Twenty 20-Sharks is a chronological survey of shark attack movies. In this entry, we finally arrive at the biggest shark attack movie of them all. Not the best. The biggest. The Meggest. (My hat is like a shark’s fin.)
I was all gung ho about reviewing The Meg for this series, but then a funny thing happened. Once I finally got here and started watching the movie, it took—and I take absolutely zero pleasure in admitting this—three whole weeks to finish watching this stupid movie. Because the dirty little secret about The Meg is that, unfortunately, The Meg is boring as shit. The titular Meg doesn’t even show up for forty minutes. And it takes even longer for it to eat anybody. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, but in this case we’re stuck with a gaggle of the flattest, least interesting characters ever assembled. Characters who deserve to be consumed by a colossal eating machine.
The Meg is an adaptation of a 1997 novel by Steve Alten titled “Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror”. This is the first in an entire series of giant shark novels that follows the adventures of intrepid rescue diver Jonas Taylor and his family, spanning eight books, and eventually crossing over with Alten’s other series of novels about the Loch Ness Monster. There is, apparently, a hell of a lot of material here for a film adaptation, and I’m already hoping we see a Meg sequel where Jason Statham rides Nessie, saddle and all. But for now: The Meg.
The Meg follows Jason Statham as Jonas Taylor, currently in self-imposed exile in a Southeast Asian village1. In the film’s prologue, we witness Jonas failing to rescue two crewmen aboard a nuclear sub besieged by an unseen killer sea creature. Years pass, and Taylor is recruited by the team aboard the Marine One underwater research facility to rescue a crew stranded at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. The whole gimmick of the movie is that scientists have discovered that the bottom of the Mariana Trench is merely a cloudy layer of super-cooled water. Punching through that layer reveals a whole new ecosystem further below, heretofore unknown to modern science.
But, of course, the crew currently exploring this new frontier has been stranded by yet another unseen killer sea creature, and it’s up to Jonas to go down and rescue them. He succeeds in bringing two of the three home safely, one of whom turns out to be Jonas’ ex-wife Lori (Jessica McNamee). It’s not long before the Marine One facility is attacked by a gigantic shark, and everyone figures out that punching through the bottom of the Trench opened a gateway for a prehistoric megalodon to wreak havoc on the surface. They track and ultimately kill the megalodon, and the day is saved. Except no. No, nothing is saved. Because there’s an even bigger megalodon waiting in the wings to wreak even more havoc.
This is where the movie finally kicks into gear. For as big and dumb as this movie is, my main complaint is that it’s honestly too complicated. Did we need all this setup for a movie about Jason Statham stabbing a gigantic shark in the eyeball? The Meg feels like the polar opposite of The Shallows, where the setup is deceptively simple, but then the movie has all sorts of fun riffing on that one basic premise. Here, we have to establish all kinds of technobabble and gadgetry just to explain where our characters are going and why there’s a shark. It all feels so unnecessary when there could have simply been a megalodon terrorizing Chinese beachgoers.
I’m going to take a step back here, because the worst kind of film criticism is the kind where you start wishcasting the movie you wished you had seen. But still, it’s hard not to imagine a version of this movie that’s basically just Jaws but in China2, starring a grizzled, balding Englishman running around with a harpoon gun.
But again, that’s not the movie they made. The Meg as it exists tries to layer on some social commentary in the form of Rainn Wilson’s Jack Morris, an Elon Musk type who serves two purposes. First and foremost, yes, the movie pretty quickly paints him as a villain of corporate malfeasance. He shows up more interested in protecting his investment than in protecting the lives of his employees. And just like the real deal, his casual everyman shtick turns out to be a poorly calculated attempt at making people like him. Because he’s also here to be the audience stand-in, the dumdum who needs all the technical mumbo jumbo explained to him. I guess the tech billionaire funding this entire project has zero working knowledge of his own investment. As I type that, I realize, yeah that tracks. And he’s also just like us, because unlike the crew on Marine One, he actually watches television.
Morris gets what’s coming to him eventually, in a little sequence that kinda references The Shallows. I love how all these shark movies I’ve been reviewing can’t stop themselves from calling back to earlier, better shark movies. Most of the time this just means referencing the fact that Jaws exists (which this movie also does, because it’s practically a requirement at this point).
The third act is really where The Meg shines. All we wanted is some giant shark mayhem, and the film finally delivers. The Marine One crew manage to kill the first Meg, only to incur the wrath of a Bigger Meg. Now tooling around the surface in search of lunch, the shark finds its way to a crowded beach where hundreds of swimmers bob up and down in the water just waiting to be picked off. It’s a fun little bit of chaos, with Bigger Meg dragging flotillas full of people here and there, a wedding ceremony gets interrupted when the groom lets the bride’s dog fall into the water (he survives, it’s adorable), and a little kid with a popsicle nearly gets lost in the shuffle when everyone panics. That’s why we come to see shark attack movies: Unadulterated chaos!
At this point, I think it’s pretty clear I don’t have much of an opinion on The Meg. It’s a mostly dull movie from pretty much every angle. In the pantheon of killer shark movies, it’s a blip. A big blip, but a blip nonetheless. As a vehicle for Jason Statham, it never really connects. Statham is usually reliable for a quip or a killer action sequence, but instead the movie saddles him with a forced half-romance with fellow diver Suyin (Li Bingbing), whose daughter gets more scenes with him than she does. Jonas has a couple of cute moments with Suyin’s kid, but it suggests a better movie where that connection actually meant something. In the pantheon of movies where Jason Statham takes care of a cute little kid? It’s no Transporter 2.
The film was directed by Jon Turteltaub, a reliable studio gun who spent most of his career making modestly entertaining films for Disney3. The Meg is his most recent feature to-date, having pivoted after this to a handful of TV projects. I wouldn’t necessarily say that any of the movie’s problems are his fault, nor would I blame any of the cast. I think it’s primarily a problem of the material just plain not having the juice. There’s only so much you can do with the premise of “big shark”. It’s why Deep Blue Sea felt the need to weave in a little bit of Die Hard into its plot. Ya gotta give us more than just a couple of sharks.
But, for better or worse, The Meg was a hit, making nearly $530 million. That guaranteed a sequel, and we’ll find out soon enough if that one has anything else to offer.
FINAL RATING
2 stars (out of 5). S’pretty lame.
NEXT TIME: The Requin (2019)
- This, incidentally, is exactly where we find Statham in Mechanic: Resurrection, the movie he made right before The Meg. Way different circumstances, obviously.
↩︎ - This was co-produced with Chinese money, if you’re wondering why all of this happens in China.
↩︎ - Including 3 Ninjas, Cool Runnings, National Treasure, and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. ↩︎
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