‘The Meg’ review — All shark, no bite

The Meg doesn’t deliver on its summer B-movie promises, though Jason Statham does his best to hold the movie together.

Jason Statham fighting a giant prehistoric shark is a log line that promises a perfectly campy B-movie summer blockbuster. And that fact that it’s coming out in the heat of August only supports that theory. However, The Meg only delivers on part of that promise. It is certainly a summer blockbuster with its shallow thrills and classic action hero moments, but this John Turteltaub directed movie completely swims past the campy B-movie moments that would make this movie pure “so bad it’s good” gold. 

That’s not to say that the movie doesn’t have its moments, Statham is a perennially solid leading man who would have absolutely shined had this movie given him more moments to flex his comedic chops like he did in 2015’s Spy. Still, he’s able to pull off a few good one-liners as Jonas Taylor, a deep-sea rescue diver who has come off a bender in Thailand to help rescue his ex-wife Lori (Jessica McNamee) from a recently uncovered section of the Marianas Trench. As Jonas was five years ago, her sub was attacked by an unseen enormous creature that is later revealed to be the titular Megalodon, a giant shark thought to be extinct for millions of years.

Eventually, Jonas is able to rescue Lori, but a new problem presents itself: The Meg was set loose from its watery dungeon. With the help of the crew of the Mana One, a marine biology research facility funded by Jack Morris (Rainn Wilson) and run by Dr. Minway Zhang (Winston Chao) and his daughter Suyin (Li Bingbing), he tracks down the Meg and attempts to kill it. And, to Turteltaub’s credit, the action scenes are the kind of adrenaline popcorn action flick set pieces that belong in a movie like this. It’s the scenes in between that are the problem. When not dealing directly with the shark, The Meg takes itself way too seriously. Usually, that’d be fine. Mission: Impossible — Fallout, another blockbuster from this summer, balances its serious moments with its camp divinely. However, The Meg can’t find that balance. It can’t be both, so it does neither. 

While some characters are certainly given more to do and play up the camp—DJ (Page Kennedy) and The Wall (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) have their momenets—most feel like flat cutouts that are there to up the body count. There are glimmers of what this movie could have been in Statham’s performance as well, but they are few and far between. Eventually, the finale, for the most part, delivers what we want—the PG-13 rating prevents it from going all the way, though—but it’s little too late for the movie. 

The Meg is fine when you’re watching it, but you could easily keep one eye on the screen or bury your head in your popcorn and not miss much. It simply fades away from memory the instant the house lights come up. Truly, the movie is not bad enough to be good. It lacks the bite it needs to reach the gigantic size of shark movie classics like Jaws or even the more recent The Shallows. Hollywood needs to give Jason Statham a broad comedy stat. Anything to make up for this dead in the water movie.

The Meg is available on Amazon ➤

★★ out of five