The Meg (2018)

Jon Turteltaub (Last Vegas, National Treasure: Book of Secrets) directs this big action and mild horror flick, seemingly pulled out of the 1990s adolescent-minded blockbuster cycle, about a megalodon, a massive 75-foot shark long thought to be extinct since the prehistoric days, that attacks a research submarine in the Mariana Tench, within the lowest depths of the Pacific Ocean.  Winston Chao (1911, Road to Dawn) plays Zhang, an oceanographer and international research center administrator from China out to save the survivors stuck in the submarine, forming a crew that includes his marine biologist daughter Suyin (Bingbing, Transformers: Age of Extinction), and soon headed by a deep-sea rescue diver, Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham, The Fate of the Furious), who comes out of retirement to save his also-trapped ex-wife (McNamee, CHIPS).  The tortured and drunken Taylor (who apparently has six-pack abs just from downing actual six packs), as we find out in the film’s introductory scene, may have a history with whatever massive creature is down there that caused the disaster, which rattled him enough to give up the occupation once and for all, or so he thought. The Meg represents a conglomeration of other shark movies that have come before, starting with Jaws, up through Deep Blue Sea, to The Shallows, up through the insane and increasingly unrealistic shark-TV-movie-a-week offerings one has seen on basic cable stations playing over the last decade.  Unlike those television offerings, The Meg can boast a much larger budget, and Jason Statham, who once trained as an Olympic diver, which may be just enough to clear the hurdle for those just looking for some low-grade action, big CG-infused visual effects, and a few moments of mild jocularity. You wouldn’t really know it from the results, which trend toward eye-candy spectacle more than anything else, that the film is based on a book first published in 1997, “Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror”, by Steve Alten, who has made a series of them since the first one.  Fans of the book have voiced their disapproval that the film mostly jettisons everything about the book, save for the large shark and a couple of the character names.  All of the typical shark-movie tropes are here, seen by the screenwriters more as a checklist to embrace rather than a series of cliches to avoid.  One of the worst of them is the one that marred the original Jaws sequels, and continues to plague the Jurassic film series, being that bigger automatically means scarier. Nevertheless, it’s not going to go down as a so-bad-it’s-good film so much as a could-have-been-good-if-it-weren’t-trying-so-hard-to-be-so-bad-it’s-good one.  The one thing that it does avoid is out-and-out gore in its delivery, relegating most of its ick-factor to ravaged whale and shark carcasses, and a severed limb or two floating in the ocean. The best thing I can say about The Meg is that it’s slickly packaged and generally watchable, with a charismatic Statham performance, and a motley, attractive supporting cast, composed, one presumes, to appeal to the world market (especially China, who funded a good deal of the film) in order to recoup lots of money internationally.  There’s a sense of let’s-just-have-fun-with-a-ridiculous-premise attitude, which works for some low-wattage thrills, though the film is never really scary or suspenseful in the slightest due to its inherent problems with characterizations and basic storytelling.  Part of the issue comes from little build-up for the megalodon itself, which ends up merely being a plot device that any form of monster or alien could have been plugged into for the same effect, taking little advantage, other than its size, of exploring the history of how such a creature came to be and survive undetected, or whatever is motivating it to do just about anything it does in the course of the story’s events. However, at nearly two hours in length, it can’t overcome an inordinate share of lulls for such a dunderheaded premise, taking nearly an hour to actually show the havoc-causing shark that we’ve already seen numerous times in nearly every advertisement and poster leading up to the film’s release.  As the plot plays to a predictable pattern, and nothing is built up to the point where we genuinely care about what’s going on, we’re only left to admire The Meg for its bells and whistles.  If Statham’s presence and slick action-packed editing are enough to shell out $10 to see, perhaps The Meg will provide just enough oomph to keep you sated at the goods it has to deliver.  if you’re looking for anything remotely substantial, or memorable after a week’s time has passed, you’ll likely find that The Meg is one very close keystroke away from a title that describes the feeling most people would have coming out of it: The Meh. Qwipster’s rating: C+ MPAA Rated: PG-13 for action/peril, bloody images and some language Running Time: 113 min. Cast: Jason Statham, Li Bingbing, Rainn Wilson, Cliff Curtis, Winston Chao, Sophia Cai, Ruby Rose, Page Kennedy, Robert Taylor, Olafur Darri Olafsson, Jessica McNamee, Masi Oka Director: Jon Turteltaub Screenplay: Dean Georgaris, Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber (based on the novel, “Meg”, by Steve Alten)