Jason Statham is among the most credible action stars around. From features like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels to high-octane franchises like The Fast franchise, The Transporter, The Expendables, to solo adventures like A Working Man, The Mechanic, and more, all are a testament to his immaculate action skills. And when you add a menacing creature to the action spectacle, the mix gets even better.
Among such features is Meg 2: The Trench, a sequel to the iconic The Meg movie that brings him face to face with a prehistoric shark. In the sequel, directed by Ben Wheatley, Statham returns as Jonas Taylor to lead a research team on an exploratory dive into the deepest depths of the ocean. Their voyage turns into chaos when a mining operation threatens their mission and forces them into a high-stakes battle for survival. Stuck between colossal, prehistoric sharks and environmental plunderers, the group must outrun and outswim their predators. Meg 2 garnered mixed reviews and couldn’t compare commercially with its predecessor, earning $397.8 million worldwide in contrast to The Meg’s $529 million box office haul. But the film polarized the critics and the audience, garnering 27% and 72% Rotten Tomatoes scores, respectively. And fans’ love for the feature is showing.
Advertisement
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Advertisement
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
Advertisement
🪙No Country for Old Men
Advertisement
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
Advertisement
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
Advertisement
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
Advertisement
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
Advertisement
05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
Advertisement
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
Advertisement
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
Advertisement
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
Advertisement
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
Advertisement
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
Advertisement
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Advertisement
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Advertisement
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Advertisement
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Advertisement
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
Advertisement
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
Advertisement
‘Meg 2: The Trench’ Finds Redemption on Streaming
As is the case with many movies nowadays that do not find their audience in the theaters but are a big hit when they drop on streaming, Meg 2 has found its audience on streaming. Meg 2: The Trench has found a spot on Netflix’s global Top 10 charts, as per FlixPatrol. It stands tall among features like the Spanish drama Desire, Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile, Robert Downey Jr.’s Due Date, and Netflix original Heartstopper Forever, among others.
Advertisement
While the movie’s pacing and tonal inconsistencies were heavily criticized, check out Meg 2 for its slick action sequences, Statham’s charismatic performance, and the new prehistoric creatures. The feature has some compelling performances from Wu Jing as Jiuming Zhang, Sophia Cai as Meiying, Cliff Curtis as Mac, Page Kennedy as DJ, Sergio Peris Mencheta as Montes, and Skyler Samuels as Jess. Also rounding off the cast are Melissanthi Mahut as Rigas, Whoopie Van Raam as Curtis, Kiran Sonia Sawar as Sal, Felix Mayr as Lance, and Sienna Guillory as Hilary Driscoll.
Check out Meg 2: The Trench on Netflix. Stay tuned to Collider for more such updates.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Runtime
116 minutes
Writers
Advertisement
Erich Hoeber, Jon Hoeber
Producers
Belle Avery, E. Bennett Walsh, Gerald R. Molen, Jason Statham, Wu Jing, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Erik Howsam, Randy Greenberg, Cate Adams, Ying Xujun
You must be logged in to post a comment Login