The Meg (2018) – Review

And so with a massive splash and a shitload of teeth, we get Hollywood’s latest attempt to liberate the killer shark genre from the clutches of the Syfy Channel and Asylum Studios with The Meg, a ludicrous horror/actioner which thrusts a 75 ft prehistoric shark again it’s only natural enemy; The Stath.
It’s been a while since killer shark movie has wrestled with such a hefty budget and a sizable scale with previous outings focusing either more on stripped back, survival movies made on a shoe string or the type of bottom shelf shit that relied more on clever, titular, wordplay than anything even remotely approaching a serviceable movie.
But with Jon Turteltaub’s The Meg, the big, brassy shark movie is back in a sizable way not seen since the likes of 1999’s Deep Blue Sea – can the promise of watching Jason Statham go toe to fin with an undersea murder monster that makes Bruce from Jaws look like a tiddler you caught in the local river, bring the levels of aquatic insanity such a ludicrous premise demands?

A billion dollar research centre at the bottom of the ocean finds itself in shit deeper than the trench they’re exploring when they encounter a Megalodon, a prehistoric shark that could gulp down a regular shark while triggering the gag relex less than a 75 year-old porn actress. With a sub stranded in the danger zone with his ex-wife on board, their only chance is Jason Statham’s Jonah, a disgraced undersea rescue pilot (stay with me) who comes with all the requisite baggage that makes up your average 80’s action hero starter pack – plus he may have come into contact with The Meg years earlier during a rescue that left him a washed up wreck.
Sporting stubble that could sandpaper an alligator smooth and a dab of alcoholism that he probably shouldn’t be treating so lightly, Jonah agrees to help out and sure enough, the aquatic super-monster he claimed existed all along breaks out from the trench’s natural barrier like some man-eating shut-in and gets some much needed space. Oh, and people. It starts eating people…
The crew of the research facility leap into action, with Jonah and determined oceanographer Suyin Zhang leading the charge as the try to figure out how exactly you subdue a Megalodon so large, it could use the shark from The Shallows as a suppository, but despite all the grit, brains and determination on show, this filled juggernaught simply isn’t going to go belly up without putting up a massive fight.
So it’s down to Jonah and this motley crew of researchers, scientists, a billionaire and the walking anime haircut that is Ruby Rose, to defeat The Meg before she raises her blood pressure by gorging on all that red meat once she makes it to the nearest, populated beach.

In case you haven’t guessed, The Meg is stupid. Not Sharknado stupid, thank God, but Deep Blue Sea stupid – which is fine. I mean, it’s not like I was expecting Shakespeare (Sharkspeare, anyone?) but due to it’s frustratingly restrained nature it frequently feels like a My First Shark Attack Movie for prepubescents. Does your pre-12-year-old like sharks but you think that Jaws, The Shallows or Deep Blue Sea may be too violent/intense for them? Then simply Meg it, as there’s nothing even close to the kind of blood stained carnage you got in the gutter-minded Piranha remake or the wry, Jaws ripoffs we got soon after the release of Spielberg’s blockbuster.
Now that’s all well and good, but you’d hope that if the filmmakers have such a cool, huge villain to play with but choose not to take the gore fest route, the film would still have tons of cool, inventive, visual gags and set pieces lined up to counteract the noticable lack of innards floating by, but maddeningly the film rarely slips the brake off and the fist pumpingly cool shit you’re hoping for never truly quite come off.
That’s a real shame, because Steve Alten’s original novel, while Michael Crichton lite, comes fully loaded with unlikely yet cool, scenarios that the film chooses to ignore; a careless surfer riding a wave directly down the Meg’s throat and a unwitting victim stumbling off a boat only to stand on the waiting shark’s lower jaw before they snap shut are, admittedly, ludicrous, but would have given the film the kick up the tail fin it sometimes needs. You mean to say you WOULDN’T want the shark to explode out of the water like a finned nuclear warhead and snatch a helicopter out of the air? Cos the film makers sure didn’t…

Despite this, however, The Meg is a decent and admittedly fun distraction, more in the line of Dwayne Johnson’s recent output than that of the arm-ripping, Samuel L. Jackson dismembering likes of Deep Blue Sea (think Rampage but less water). It’s colourful, bright, slick, glib and Statham’s pbviously is having having a whale of a time flying about the place in a wetsuit – in fact, everyone seems to be enjoying themselves so much it’s hard not to be drawn in, if only a little. The supporting cast has enough familiar character actors to make you feel at home (all hail Cliff Curtis) and even has The Office’s Rainn Wilson on board as a comic relief billionaire back in the days when that would actually still be funny. Props also have to go to the impressively un-annoying little girl who ticks the box of “precocious child in a Jurassic Park-type movie” without you ever once wanting to fling the smart-ass little moppet directly at the nearest source of gnashing teeth.
As a lover of killer animal movies whose dedication to the genre goes deeper than the Mariana Trench, I’d be lying if I said that the rather restrained nature of the kills wasn’t a source of initial disappointment, but as the film favours action and adventure over pulped guts, it gives some nicely ramped up moments based on shit you’ve already seen. The shark cage moment from Jaws is reworked with the Meg trying to gulp down Li Bingbing’s super-shark cage like a seagull with a hotdog, the beach attack has a nice sense of scale and the final fight finally embraces the ridiculous just in the Nick of time.

In summation? Not as wry as the original Piranha or Alligator, not as tense as The Shallows or Open Water, not as gory as the Piranha remake, nor as explodey as Deep Blue Sea and I won’t even mention Jaws…. Yet thank God that The Meg and Stath’s final face-off goes a fair way to correcting this (yes, they actually go hand-to-fin at one point), but any sequels really need to up the carnage because ironically, this is one shark that could’ve used a bit more meat between it’s teeth…

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