The Meg Review

Over 40 years ago audiences were scared to swim in the ocean after the release of Jaws. Now the Jaws story has been given an injection of steroids due to The Meg.

Deep below the Pacific Ocean a team of scientist explore an uncharted area of the Marianas Trench and discover pre-historic creatures that have been protected by a layer of freezing water. When the mission goes wrong legendary deep sea diver Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) is sent to rescue a submarine below the supercold cloud of water but ends up releasing a prehistoric shark to the rest of the world.

The Meg clearly wanted to be the new dumb fan movie, a B-movie that happened to have a big budget. The trailer for The Meg was tongue-in-cheek and there is a surge of monster movies recently: Godzilla, Kong: Skull Island and Rampage being examples. Yet, The Meg is weirdly dull considering its silly premise. There is some self-awareness – Jason Statham clearly knew what kind of film he was in and had fun with it and there was some humour in his performance.

The Meg was directed by Jon Turteltaub, a man who has had a respectable career – he made films like Cool Runnings, The National Treasure series and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Yet his direction with The Meg is listless and flat. The tone is more serious than the trailers suggested and wanted to be more heartfelt so audiences could get emotionally invested. But it was hollow because of the CGI and a lack of engaging action.

The Meg is also a part of another trend in modern blockbuster cinema: being invested by the Chinese companies with the aim to appeal to Chinese audiences. Li Bingbing, who Western audiences will properly know from The Forbidden Kingdom and Transformers: Age of Extinction and Winston Chao were given prominent roles and the film takes place in Asia – Jonas was living in exile in Thailand and the finale took place at Sanya Bay, a Chinese beach resort. From a business standpoint it makes a lot of sense, international audiences have saved films that flopped in North America and compared to some other films that cast Chinese actors in token roles – Bingbing actually plays an important part in the film.

The film also had an international cast, having the likes of Cliff Curtis, Ruby Rose and Ólafur Darri Ólafsson in supporting roles and you can’t blame them for getting an easy paycheque. The most impressive member of the cast was Shuya Sophia Cai, Bingbing’s onscreen daughter. She was a cute little girl who had strong comedic timing for a child her age. Whilst Chinese characters were well represented, the same cannot be said about DJ (Page Kennedy), the only African-American character who was a walking stereotype – a character who was cowardly and couldn’t swim. DJ even makes a comment about this but it doesn’t make it any better.

The Meg is not as fun as it could have been, being unoriginal, an uninspired monster film that seemed like it was made by accountants rather than filmmakers.