Go Big or Go Home: The Meg’s Colossal Bore

They say a shark has to constantly move forward or it dies. Consider this less a review, and more of a PSA – Warning: despite the promising trappings of cheesy, monster-carnage havoc and drive-in style glee, the only thing colossal about The Meg is what an enormous bore it turns out to be. I suspect like many of you, I missed The Meg in theaters last August, but thought the sure-fire premise would make it more than worth checking out on home video. I’m no snob – given the choice between Kong: Skull Island and Florence Foster Jenkins¸ I’m going Kong every time. Giant monsters are one of my favorite things, okay? And a colossal shark sounds like just what the doctor ordered. But in director Jon Turteltaub’s (National Treasure) aquatic opus, the titular terror doesn’t show up for-ever – so all we’re left with are the characters. So viewer be warned, this is one tedious, thinly-sketched collection of stock individuals.

Author Steve Alten published the first Meg book in 1997, and has turned the notion of a living fossil specimen of a Megalodon – a giant prehistoric shark – into a whole series of Meg titles, thanks to an easily digestible two-word pitch: “Jurassic Shark.” As deep sea submersible pilot Jonas Taylor, Jason Statham acquits himself as the protagonist in search of redemption and vindication – initially the one guy who believes it exists, due to a haunting encounter in his past. Now, years later when scientists from an undersea research lab are trapped inside a disabled sub, Statham gets the call to come save the day. The Meg feels shamelessly engineered to appeal to the overseas market. The book’s Japanese scientists and location have been unnecessarily swapped-out for Chinese counterparts, courtesy of production company Gravity Pictures.

The special effects in The Meg are decent enough, but there just aren’t enough of them, and the characters feel like they were written by an eager young lad steeped in the disaster movie/TV oeuvre of Irwin Allen. You’ll be bored senseless waiting for the shark to appear, and when it does, the filmmakers really hold back on the kind of chum-bucket antics you’d expect. The peril is restrained and antiseptic, with a near absence of “Wow” moments. Deep Blue Sea this ain’t. Characters randomly just fall into the sea for no other reason than to conveniently almost get chomped – which they seldom do. I was amazed at how boring it all was, and the nearly 2-hour running time felt twice as long.

Gravity Pictures’ involvement certainly paid off: with a domestic/international haul of $143 mill/$384 mill, a string of Meg sequels seems inevitable, even if they may be straight-to-video – which will make them completely indistinguishable stylistically from the film that spawned them – though hopefully one of them will be helmed by someone hungry enough to do something more exciting with the ingredients. This fish just lays there, nearly lifeless, stinking-up the dock.