Film Review: The Meg
"The Meg" might not know it's a bad summer movie, but audiences will get the picture
Jason Statham in a great white towel counts as one of the few thrills in the end-of-summer CGI sharkfest The Meg (★). Most of the rest of the movie, directed by Jon Turteltaub (National Treasure), looks, sounds, and moves like it was patched together over an extended length of time by several committees full of translators.
Scripts for a film adaptation of Steve Alten’s 1997 novel Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror have been flopping between studios since before the smart-shark hit Deep Blue Sea rose up in 1999 and stole Meg‘s thunder. Since then, the project has passed through the hands of many filmmakers, including Eli Roth and Guillermo Del Toro. Either one of those eccentric horror-meisters might have delivered a more ferocious thriller with Meg‘s reported $150-million budget. Turteltaub instead turns in something neither scary or suspenseful, and often funnier than it intends to be.
Set in one of those generic “research labs” populated by a checklist of international sharkbait — including Chinese star Li Bingbing, queer Aussie star Ruby Rose, New Zealand star Cliff Curtis, and Rainn Wilson — The Meg is far too short on riveting set-pieces, and way too long on hollow emotional speechifying. Just get to the Boeing-sized, supposedly extinct megalodon munching on whoever really has it coming, please. The story takes several dives into the miles-deep abyss before Turteltaub reveals more than a hint of the monster. The full visual feast is fairly unspectacular, though, except for one fantastic shot of the beast breaching the water, up and onto a ship.
Leading the charge into the heretofore unknown depths after the prehistoric predator is deep-sea rescue expert, Jonas Taylor, played by the taut and toothy Statham. Haunted by a rescue gone wrong, Taylor is the only guy for the job when a mini-sub of scientists is lost at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Of course, being haunted, he doesn’t want to go. But, Jonas, he’s told, one of those scientists down there is your ex-wife. Down he goes.
Why don’t these pictures — like The Rock’s recent Skyscraper, which also revolved around a rescue expert who’s haunted by a rescue gone wrong, and called in to save loved ones in distress — just skip the “I don’t _____ anymore” setup? It might be exciting to simply dive into the fray with one of these dynamic problem-solvers and pick up the remaining plot points as the action moves along.
In The Meg, Taylor is a problem-solver surrounded by inept numbskulls, save for the extremely capable scientist-scuba diver-submarine pilot-smirk machine Suyin. Li is credible as this marine expert who would willingly take a dip in a polycarbonate shark cage to get a good shot at the giant shark, but her wooden acting can’t save the film’s overreaching dramatic moments. Although, it’s no fault of the actress that one of her big emotional scenes looks like it was shot at a mall photography studio. Seriously, where did all that money go?
The Meg is rated PG-13, and opens in theaters everywhere August 10. Visit fandango.com.
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