The Meg (2018)
Cast
- Jason Statham as Jonas Taylor
- Ruby Rose as Jaxx
- Jessica McNamee as Celeste
- Robert Taylor as Dr. Heller
- Rainn Wilson as Jack Morris
- Li Bingbing as Suyin
- Cliff Curtis as James 'Mac' Mackreides
- Masi Oka as Toshi
Director
- Jon Turteltaub
Writer (based on the novel "Meg" by)
- Steve Alten
Writer
- Dean Georgaris
- Jon Hoeber
Writer
- Erich Hoeber
Cinematographer
- Tom Stern
Editor
- Steven Kemper
- Kelly Matsumoto
Composer
- Harry Gregson-Williams
Action, Horror, Science Fiction, Thriller
113 minutes
In news that probably will not shock anyone, “The Meg,” the long-gestating screen adaptation of Steve Alten’s best-selling novel, comes nowhere close to equalling the genius of Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws”—considering
that that film is one of the few truly perfect works conjured up in the
history of American cinema. It is not even on a par with “The Shallows,” the ingenious 2016 Blake Lively
thriller that is probably the best of all the post-“Jaws” shark-based
entertainments to come along in the ensuing decades. When all is said
and done, it is little more than a cheesy thriller in which a
jumbo-sized shark wreaks havoc on the cast until Jason Statham
arrives to save the day—the only real question being whether Statham
will actually punch the creature into oblivion or not.
(“Sharkpuncher”—that does have a ring to it.) The good news is that it
at least is perfectly aware of what it's supposed to be doing—supplying
viewers with enough aquatic carnage (though not enough to threaten the
PG-13 rating) to painlessly pass a couple of hours in the multiplex
during the dog days of August—and manages to accomplish that modest goal
with minimum fuss. The end result may be little more than an
exponentially more expensive version of those cheapo Syfy channel
movies, but at least it has the good taste to be exponentially better as
well.
Statham plays Jonas Taylor, the world’s best deep-sea rescue diver. Well, he was the
world’s best until a rescue attempt in the Philippines went sour, and
his claims that the ship was attacked by a mysterious unseen creature
are dismissed as pressure-induced psychosis and cause him to lose
everything. Five years later, he is on an unending bender in Thailand
when he is visited by an old colleague, inevitably named Mac (Cliff Curtis) and, Mac’s new boss, Zhang (Winston Chao),
who is the head of an underwater research facility outside of Shanghai
that is looking into the possibility of a previously undetected undersea
realm beneath the floor of the Marianas Trench. While exploring this
new world, the sub containing three members of the research team, one of
whom just happens to be Jonas’s ex-wife (Jessica McNamee)
is hit by something and leaves them crippled and with a rescue window
of about 18 hours. Would Jonas perhaps consider taking advantage of the
opportunity to save his ex, confront his fears and prove that he wasn’t
crazy after all?
In a shocking turn of events, Jonas agrees and
is taken out to the facility, where he is introduced to the highly
selected group of walking cliches that include Rainn Wilson as the egomaniacal billionaire who is funding the whole thing, Ruby Rose as the edgy tech genius who is, perhaps inevitably, named Jaxx, Page Kennedy
as the wacky African-American who doesn’t know how to swim and didn’t
sign up for this, and Bingbing Li as Suyin, who is Zhang’s daughter and
who supplies the film with a precocious eight-year-old daughter (Shuya Sophia Cai),
a potential romantic interest for Jonas and, perhaps most importantly,
box-office interest from the increasingly important Chinese audience.
(There are also a lot of additional people who mysteriously appear when
needed and then vanish when they are not.) Anyway, during the rescue
attempt, the creature attacks again and proves to be no less than a
megalodon, a deadly shark about 70 feet long that had been assumed to be
extinct. Before Jonas can say “I told you so” to everyone within
earshot, it is discovered that the beast has managed to escape from the
depths where it had been contained and has reached open water. Now he
and the others must figure out a way to bring the megalodon down before
it can use a crowded nearby beach as its reentry point to the top of the
food chain.
“The Meg” (whose story, from what I understand, is
quite different from the original novel) may not be the most ferociously
original film ever made—to be fair, though, with a tale involving
drunken divers, ex-wives, goofy money men and a shark most people do not
believe exists, there are times when it feels less like a “Jaws”
knockoff and more like a bizarre riff on “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.”
The emphasis here is more on goofy action thrills than on gut-crunching
scares and in that regards, it was a good idea to give the directorial
reins to Jon Turteltaub, whose name may not symbolize horror filmmaking (depending on your personal stance towards “While You Were Sleeping,” of course) but whose “National Treasure”
films also told stories that started off being completely preposterous
and then got progressively sillier as they went on. Here, he clearly
went into the project knowing that he was never going to top “Jaws” in
terms of thrills and instead takes a lighter, sillier approach—well, as
light and silly as can be with a film in which people are eaten by
sharks. The screenplay is filled with cliches but at least they have
been deployed with a certain amount of wit and style this time around,
and there are even a couple of moments in which he uses the audience’s
presumptions to make for some real surprises.
Serving as the center of all the surrounding silliness is Statham
and while it may not necessarily sound like a compliment, he is actually
the perfect person for a film like this. He has the straightforward
heroic demeanor down pat while also possessing a tongue-in-cheek sense
of humor that is a nice complement to the surrounding nonsense.
“The
Meg” is no masterpiece by any means—the inevitable attack on swarms of
innocent swimmers feels oddly truncated and the climactic battle is not
nearly as exciting as some of the earlier action beats. However, it
manages to hit upon a reasonably effective blend of action and humor
that never sinks to the strained depths of the “Sharknado” saga and
similar films that have emerged since the technology was developed to
bring poorly rendered CGI sharks to the masses (and, truth be told, I
also vastly prefer it to that “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom”
gibberish). And when "The Meg" finally arrives at its most overt “Jaws”
reference, the film proves to be more clever and amusing than one might
ordinarily expect under the circumstances. Who could ask for anything
more—except for more sharkpunching, of course.
