The Meg is a 2018 action film about a man who escaped an attack by what he claims was a 70-foot shark, now confronting his fears to save those trapped in a sunken submersible.
Jason Statham faces off against his biggest foe yet when a giant, prehistoric shark is released from the depths of the ocean in The Meg. Now, based on that description, you can probably guess what the quality of this film is like. Having said that, because this film is self-aware enough to not take itself too seriously, peppers in some cheesy one-liners, and brings plenty of over-the-top action, we’re left with a movie that passes as watchable.
The movie begins as a rescue team led by Jonas Taylor (Statham) attempts to save the crew of a nuclear submarine. During the rescue, the hull of the sub is rammed by some unknown monster, trapping part of Taylor’s crew and forcing him to leave them behind before the sub ends up exploding. A member of the rescue team, Dr. Heller (Robert Taylor), accuses Taylor of abandoning the men due to a pressure-induced psychosis.
Five years later we’re brought to the Mana One underwater research vessel, some 200 miles away from China. Billionaire financier Jack Morris (Rainn Wilson) flies out as his team, led by Dr. Minway Zhang (Winston Chao) and his daughter Suyin (Li Bingbing), are about to explore what might be an even deeper section of the Marianas trench that has been hidden by a cloud of hydrogen sulfide. A team led by Taylor’s ex-wife, Lori (Jessica McNamee), take a sub to the unexplored section where they are rammed by a massive creature and trapped on the ocean floor.
In order to save the trapped team, one of Taylor’s former crew members who is now on the Mana One, James Mackreides (Cliff Curtis) travels to Thailand to recruit him for the rescue mission. Taylor agrees to come along upon learning that it’s Lori who is trapped. When Taylor dives down for the mission, he comes across the giant creature that has been wreaking havoc, a Megalodon shark. Despite a close call, Taylor is able to rescue Lori and get her back to the Mana One. However, when the sub was passing through the hydrogen sulfide cloud, the Meg followed it back up and begins reigning terror on all those in it’s path. It’s now up to Taylor and the Mana One crew to track and kill the beast that is killing everything it comes across.
You really get what you pay for with this one. The positives of the movie are that it tries to bring plenty of humor to the table, because this is not a movie that can be taken seriously. Most of the humor is pretty cheesy and juvenile, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get a laugh or two out of the movie. Another aspect of the movie that they got right was plenty of action. This is clearly a concept for a movie where plot is not going to be important, so it’s crucial to ramp up the action and don’t let it stop. As soon as the movie unfolds its plot and introduces the shark, the action kicks in and doesn’t quit. The last part that I appreciated was that they dragged out introducing the shark for a while. You don’t get a good glimpse of it for about the first third of the movie, you just know that it’s lurking close by. It felt like a nice nod to how Steven Spielberg approached making Jaws.
As self-aware as the movie was, it did try to have some serious, emotional parts, which just did not work. It was painstaking in the audience trying to watch them force a touching father/daughter moment that was utterly unnecessary. On top of that, the movie wound up feeling like it was about 15-20 minutes too long, so they easily could’ve cut those parts out with no issue. The ending, asides from being wildly ridiculous, was another part that dragged out. Considering the second two thirds of the movie are entirely devoted to hunting and killing the shark, by the very end I was squirming in my seat waiting for the movie to wrap things up. One of my final gripes with the movie was that it just felt too CGI driven. Obviously there is a need for heavy CGI in order to create a giant, prehistoric shark, but it just looked like something out of a video game.
Although I was entertained through a majority of the film, this is not one that I can recommend shelling out money to see in the theater. It goes without saying that it’s nowhere close to the level of quality that we got from Jaws, and I would compare it to a less serious Deep Blue Sea. If you need a fun, mindless watch that might bring a chuckle and make you jump once or twice, The Meg is probably the movie you’re looking for.