The Meg Is A Shark Tale With Too Many Boring Humans And Not Enough Shark Carnage

There's a big o'l shark in the water in The Meg and not just any shark, oh no. This is a megalodon, a gigantic type of shark with a powerful bite that was thought to be extinct for millions of years. Now a surviving megalodon has been discovered at previously uncharted depths of the ocean by a Chinese research facility and it's attacking a stranded vessel containing three still alive scientists. Who could possibly go so deep into the ocean and save them from this massive shark? Jason Statham of course! Statham plays Jonas Taylor, a diver who has spent years in hiding in Thailand after a mission went sideways thanks to this very same megalodon. He's got a score to settle and rescuing this trio of scientists might just be the way to do that.

Of course, in the process of this rescue mission, this megalodon, thanks to Suyin Zhang (Li Bingbing) accidentally breaking through a pressure field that was previously containing this bead, ends up swimming upwards, taking it from the very bottom of the ocean to nearby beaches and boats where it can chomp on some humans. When The Meg decides to just focus on that kind of megalodon carnage, it's a reasonably fun ride, evoking other goofy late summer treats like G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra in how much it just wallows in being a more polished looking B-movie. These best moments come from the playful quality in which The Meg handles the presence of this gigantic shark, whether it's through numerous enjoyable fake-out jump scares to the creative ways it finds for the megalodon foe to gobble up people.

But too much of the screentime in The Meg is dedicated to human characters who are mostly a snooze, as the script is riddled with character arcs that go nowhere, most notably Jonas Taylor being introduced as having become an alcoholic in his time as a recluse in Thailand before never following up on this detail again.  Too many of our principal players, such as a cocky billionaire played by Rainn Wilson or a precocious youngster, have thinly-sketched personalities that could have come from any number of other movies. Jonas Taylor is a great example of this issue, as he may allow Jason Statham to do his whole cooly confident action hero routine in a much bigger-in-scale canvas than usual for the actor, but you could have told me this was his same character from The Mechanic or The Expendables and I totally would have believed you. 

Shouldn't a movie where a massive prehistoric shark is on the loose be the chance to let loose and have some human characters who are truly weird or at least more distinctive than the main characters of The Meg? At least the likes of Jonas Taylor have derivative personalities, characters played by the two best actors in the cast, Ruby Rose and Cliff Curtis, don't even get a personality to speak of, I don't even know what function the character played by Curtis served in the movie! Honestly, these problems with the characters wouldn't even be a massive issue if this was a lean and mean 90-minute movie that was just a constant barrage of shark mayhem, but too much of The Meg intends for the audience to get invested in Jonas Taylor and company just hanging out in a hospital wing or getting into intense debates in meetings and without any characters who are even just memorably odd to latch onto, such sequences really get old fast.

Thankfully, every so often the titular beast shows up to munch on some people and tip over some boats and The Meg finds itself faring reasonably well, if not anywhere near exceptionally well, at what it was supposed to do. A pity that we get to see this shark prey on the masses for only a short scene (we mostly see the Meg hunting down Jonas Taylor and his group consisting of only ten or so people) and it's peculiar that we don't see this megalodon chow down on nearly as many people as you might think. Even when the Meg goes in for the kill, most of it's kept off-screen, including this megalodon gobbling up cruel shark hunters, an awesome sounding sequence that we only get to see the aftermath of! That could have been a super fun sequence akin to the climactic animals getting revenge on cruel animal abusers moment in Stardust and it certainly would have been more interesting than watching Statham and Li Bingbing try to have romantic chemistry!

Keeping such gruesome demises (that should be the whole point of making a shark thriller, right?) off-screen may have been done to tone the film down from its original R MPAA rating, but for whatever reason they chose to make such a move, it ends up making The Meg feel like it left a lot of potential for nutty mayhem on the table. At least, unlike the two Jurassic World movies, The Meg has the good sense to carry a light-hearted tone that ensures that it isn't a slog to watch and the shark sequences are pretty fun more often than not, particularly the climactic showdown with Jason Statham that results in the sort of high-wire zaniness that The Meg needed more of. Maybe then it could have been a gloriously unhinged & fun shark tale instead of merely a serviceable one.