Just when you thought Ben Wheatley’s career couldn’t get any more depressing after the Netflix remake of Rebecca, the British director sinks to new depths with this sequel to 2018 megalodon movie The Meg.

Following the death of his wife (unceremoniously killed off when actor Li Bingbing jumped ship), Jonas (Jason Statham) and his step-daughter Meiying (Sophia Cai) return to the Mariana Trench, alongside Meiying’s Shark-training uncle (Wu Jing), which makes them the Jonas Step-Brothers. There they discover “the biggest meg anyone’s ever seen”, but not before an hour of tedious technobabble and torturous acting, the international cast so lacking in chemistry they should have called this film The Great Language Barrier Reef.

Anyone lured by the bait of the trailer will be shorely disappointed by the two hours of humourless padding between bloodless shark attacks, which amount to just 60 seconds of fin-based fun. The boring characters spend more time fighting humans than sharks, apparently too distracted by a subplot about industrialists hijacking their research facility to worry about the biggest sea-based disaster since Avatar: The Way of Water.

Why does a film that should have just been Jason Statham punching fish for 90 minutes want to get bogged down in sharkless drama? Surely not for budgetary reasons, given its $129 million production that belies the weightless-looking megalodon and deeply unexceptional cast. This suggests Meg 2: The Trench is embarrassed about being a dumb shark movie, even though that is the entire point of its existence as acknowledged by the genuinely effective marketing campaign.

When The Meg proved big in China, and Li Bingbing’s departure freed the film of its useless love story, the series had the chance to shed the semi-seriousness holding it back from being enjoyable summer fodder. After all, the original seasonal blockbuster was a shark movie. On the other hand, if the franchise wants to be Jaws it needs better explanations for why a child (who demands to be “taken seriously as a scientist”) is joining a 25,000ft subsea expedition than having her argue before the dive: “This is your 26th dive without incident.” It does make you question her potential as a scientist, although one can hardly blame her for being bored.

But the line that best sums up the sequel is when Statham sighs, “Oh great, more megs.” Meg 2 ought to have jumped the shark. Instead it is simply over it.