The Meg

photo courtesy of warnerbroscanada.com

SPOILER-FREE REVIEW

     Jason Statham fights a prehistoric Megalodon shark in his latest action movie, The Meg. Statham plays Jonas, a diver/general bad-ass responsible for rescuing a team of explorers lost in the darkness of the Mariana Trench. But getting back from the Trench safely is only half the battle. Protecting the world from what they find down there—an enormous species of shark thought to be long extinct—will be much more difficult.

The Meg brings high-budget production value to the low-budget shark movie. The money makes an appreciable difference when you compare The Meg to B-movie shark flicks like Sharknado, and even higher profile releases like The Shallows or 48 Meters Down. For the most part, it gets spent on recruiting recognizable actors (Statham, Rainn Wilson, Ruby Rose, Li Bingbing), creating CGI Megalodons, and giving the movie a techno-savvy sheen.

photo courtesy of indianexpress.com

     But make no mistake: The Meg has B-movie in its bones. All the signs are there: rough acting and dialogue, passable CGI (despite the increased budget), a new damsel in distress every 5 minutes or so, and a cookie-cutter romance subplot between its two main characters. In terms of narrative, The Meg starts stronger than your average shark flick, but before long it seems perfectly content to let characterization and/or plot take a back seat to… well, sharks eating people and/or almost eating people.

     Now, none of this disqualifies The Meg from being a good time. Between jump scares and some genuinely exciting action set pieces, the movie packs in plenty of entertainment value. There’s nothing exactly new involved, but The Meg essentially delivers what it promises (though, truth be told, it would benefit from leaning into the absurdity a bit more than it does). So while you probably shouldn’t expect greatness, you can count on silly, shark-filled misadventures.

TRAILER

Watch the trailer here. 

photo courtesy of theplaylist.net