You could have gone one of two ways with The Meg, play it straight, just like Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece Jaws, or go the comedic route, a la the Sharknado series. The main problem with The Meg is that it tries to have it both ways: it tries to be a deadly serious drama about a super-sized shark that terrorizes coastal China while also having goofy humor, and the result is that The Meg is just…meh. Based on the popular novel by Steve Alten, the concept of The Meg is based on a real life monster shark, the Megalodon, that lived back in the dinosaur age but went extinct millions of years ago.
But The Meg posits that there’s more Megs than you can shake a shark cage at living under a layer of gas at the bottom of one of the deepest trenches in the ocean. And when a three person submarine pierces this layer of gas, it helps the Meg to reach the surface (Note: there’s virtually no mention of anybody going through decompression in this movie, much like how there’s virtually no mention of anything even remotely vaguely scientific at all in The Meg). Jason Statham, who’s been called in to help rescue the trapped sub crew, has been a shiftless drunk in Thailand for the last five years because nobody believed him when he saw a Meg attack a downed Navy submarine he was rescuing the crew from (never mind the fact that Statham’s little mini sub in the flashback scene wouldn’t have had enough room to carry the entire crew of what looked like a Los Angeles-Class Navy sub, anyway…but shhh, enough with the rational thoughts, already, this is The Meg, revel in its stupidity!).
Of course, being the action star that he is, Statham sticks around once it’s discovered that the sharks of unusually large size are now swimming around the nice normal ocean. As directed by Jon Turteltaub (who helmed the entertaining National Treasure movies starring Nick Cage), The Meg is cheesy fun, but nothing more. It lacks the gravitas of another underwater epic, James Cameron’s The Abyss--seeing how there is very little tension in The Meg, even in scenes that are supposed to be suspenseful, and you barely know the names of any of The Meg’s side characters, let alone who they are as people. All I know of the secondary characters is that the underwater equipment designer was played by Ruby Rose, who I kept rooting for not to be eaten just so she can go on to play Batwoman in the CW crossover later this month (I have my priorities, darn it).
And when The Meg goes for humor, like the cute bit with the Yorkie in the water, it doesn’t really go far enough to elicit real laughs. At times I wished The Meg would just dive overboard and get really silly. After all, the extreme goofiness on display is part of the Sharknado series' charm. Maybe the makers of The Meg didn’t want to get too serious, because they didn't want to be compared to the classic Jaws. Yet previous shark movies, like The Shallows and 47 Meters Down, managed to update the shark attack movie with a serious tone successfully. With The Meg taking a wishy-washy serious/comedic tone, the movie seems to be ashamed of its own story, and in doing so doesn’t allow the viewer to make any investment whatsoever. The result is that The Meg is about as memorable as one of the many unremarkable ‘Attack of the Mutant Shark/Octopus/Hedgehog’ made for TV movies that constantly air on cable TV. --SF
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