The Meg was a movie with very, very few redeeming qualities: It wasted a fun premise on hoary clichés, unexciting and generic action, and way too much waffling with its corny, boring as fuck characters. It seemed to expect us to care about a bunch of shitty melodrama, while failing to deliver even close to the amount of madness needed to make it palatable.
Director Ben Wheatley (in full anonymous studio director mode) course corrects admirably for the sequel. This movie has a lot of problems, but embracing its ridiculous sense of excess is not one of them. It populates its almost two hours with silly developments, punchy deaths, and not just shark attacks but some sort of crocodile dinosaur monsters and a giant octopus. Quantity over quality, absolutely, but in owning that it's a dumb monster movie and committing to it with enthusiasm, it makes its plot holes, continuity errors, laughably shallow characters and dodgy CGI entirely forgivable.
After the events of the first movie, Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) has turned into some sort of a 'green James Bond', as his friends describe him while debating just how awesome he is. That only factors into the first scene and never really matters again, which is par for the course for this movie's script (by Jon & Erich Hoeber and Dean Georgaris - the same team who did the first one). It's fine; it gives Statham a decent fight scene, at least.
The movie gets going properly after some table setting, when Jonas and suave scientist Jiuming (the great Wu Jing, who criminally doesn't get a single fight of his own) mount an expedition to the trench where The Meg originally came from: a hidden, mysterious ecosystem blocked off by a thermocline (a barrier of cold water). They take along a few characters to act as redshirts (these movies are firm believers in plot armor), and get a stowaway in Meiying (Sophia Cai), Jonas's teen stepdaughter.
Once in the trench, the crew find an illicit mining operation and sabotage gets them stranded in the ocean floor From there it's a series of action scenes pretty much all the way to the finish line - fighting against various underwater beasties, then a host of evil mercenaries protecting the mining operation, and then all hell breaks loose as the thermocline is breached and a bunch of Megs, along with what may as well be a fucking Kraken make it to the surface (decompression doesn't seem to exist in this universe).
And you know what? It works. The action is varied, extravagant and fun: you get survival challenges, a nasty death when a helm breaches deep underwater, a die-hard-in-an-oilrig section, and an assortment of monsters going wild in some sort of beach resort which more than makes up for the piddly similar section in the first movie. This one has shots from within the shark as it snaps people up! Sure, there's barely any blood, but it's the sort of silly carnage that wouldn't necessarily benefit from it.
The effects are... well, they're very artificial-looking, modelled after Chinese blockbusters where they don't really care about things looking even marginally realistic. Unless you're unusually sensitive to that, the action is cool enough that it's never more than a minor distraction.
The script is terrible, but at least this time around it understands that it's only there to carry the characters from one peril to the next. It could stand to be a lot funnier (the characters communicate in glib sentences that often clunk lifelessly to the ground and... just lie there, flopping around in a sort of slow humour death), but at no point are we asked to care for some tired, trite melodrama.
There are continuity errors aplenty, and while it's hard to accuse a movie with a plot as dumb as this of having plot holes, there's definitely a surfeit of dumb. As with the bad effects or the lack of anything deeper to say than 'the only thing cooler than a shark is a shark the size of five sharks', it's part of the movie's DNA; If you can look past it, there's a lot here to like.
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