THE MEG
** SPOILERS **
The Meg is 33% decent and 67% shameless and, for a Jason Statham vs a giant shark movie, these turn out to be surprisingly winning statistics. This is a film where the actors take on everything with total earnestness while the screenplay by Dean Georgaris, Jon Hoeber, and Erich Hoeber and the direction by Jon Turteltaub throw in things like a tiny dog swimming in the middle of the ocean and coming face to face with a giant shark and a Chinese woman yelling "Pa! Pa!" whom they felt the need to subtitle "Dad! Dad!" The finale of The Meg is like Crazy Rich Asians at the beach, except dozens of them are being ripped apart by a Megalodon. Also, soldiers sent to kill the Meg with dynamite can't tell the difference between a shark and a whale. This is that kind of movie. But for a 2018 summer film about a prehistoric beast, it's way more ridiculously entertaining than Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. Bite me.
And yet, the actors 100% believe nothing happening is ridiculous, which helps a whole lot. Jason Statham is a deep-sea rescue diver who unwittingly encountered the Meg five years prior. When an attempt to explore the Marianas Trench deep, deep in the ocean unwittingly reveals the existence of a Megalodon shark, long thought extinct, Statham is brought back to rescue his ex-wife Jessica McNamee, who is in command of the lost sub. Statham saves the day but the rescue ends up unleashing the Megalodon, which swims up to the surface and decides all of these humans on the deep sea research station owned by skeezy billionaire Rainn Wilson are its mortal enemies.
Statham and the multinational cadre of actors like Li Bingbing (whom he has the hots for and vice versa), Cliff Curtis, Ruby Rose, and Page Kennedy, declare war on the Meg right back. Off they go a-huntin' for the giant shark, only to find out there's a second, even bigger Meg! "Nobody said there were two of them!" Kennedy yells, echoing the audience's thoughts at the movie's marketing. Despite their best efforts, the Meg(s) destroy every single boat the humans are on, their shark cages, most of their submarines, and the sharks ruin a fun beach holiday off the coast of China to boot.
The Megs themselves are not sharks to remember. They're drab, brownish, CGI monstrosities that lack the presence and character of Spielberg's shark in Jaws. But no matter. This is a movie where Statham pilots a one-man sub against the Meg and then goes into hand-to-hand combat with it for good measure. But while Statham's gruff, macho skills are put to the test against the sharks, the real action is between him and Li. Sparks fly between the two, and her 8-year-old daughter Shuya Sophia Cai is all for her mommy moving on with this heroic, macho, bald Englishman with the magic lips that resuscitated her when she drowned. We end up rooting for them to get together as much as we root for them to beat the Meg. In the end, we're glad they all end up chums.
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