Title: The Meg 2: The Trench
I admit it. I like cheesy monster movies. I've watched all 359,837,934 Sharknado movies. I've seen every Jurassic Park movie. Godzilla? Yes Please. I thought The Meg was great. Perfect balance of cheese and action. SyFy channel monster movies are the best.
The Meg 2 is obviously the sequel to the Meg. It picks up years later with the Romantic Interest of Statham dead and her kid in her teens. A couple of the other side characters return, but it's mostly new folks. One of the best is a returnign character from the first movie that was 100% useless and spent the enter first movie almost dying. He returns more prepared.
So now they are making regular trips to plot out The Trench, a Large high tech ocean platform that they operate from and even have a "domesticated" Meg that they are training. I said it was cheesy.
Enter the bad guys. An evil corporation is mining the Trench for rare earth metals and a few of the people running the platform for the good guys are in on it. Their operation is discovered and chaos ensues s there are now 3 Megs, including a really, really big one, some velociraptor-type creatures and to top things off, a giant octopus. Again, I said it was cheesy.
There are several Easter eggs referencing Jurassic Park scenes, silly stunts involving Statham fighting sharks and the bad guys all get killed in various horrific, yet satisfying methods. The action scenes are hilariously contrived, the Sharks eat hundreds of people who can't follow directions, it's pandalerium.
If you like this type of movie, it's very enjoyable. Statham was clearly having a good time.
FUN: 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 🍿🍿
Preachy: Not really. Maybe a subtle underlying message against exploitation of the ocean as a dumping ground and as something to be strip-mined for profit.