The Meg review: A frantic dive to the ocean bed of imbecility

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Matthew Norman10 August 2018

In any film staking a claim to so-bad-it’s-good status, but stuck in the badlands between the unwatchably appalling and the rivetingly atrocious, there comes a moment of decision. Are you willing, and if so are you able, to jettison all conventional critical judgment and happily submerge yourself in the idiocy?

With The Meg that moment comes soon after this sub-sub-sub-sub-Spielbergian dinosaur-shark hybrid — frankly you’re gonna need a bigger fleet of subs — opens with a submersible diving deeper than humanity has before.

In coastal Shanghai — or “Shanghai, China”, as a caption thoughtfully clarifies, lest we mistake it for Shanghai, Chad — halfwitted US mogul Jack Morris (Rainn Wilson) is funding a $1.3 billion project to determine if the Mariana Trench, the planet’s deepest spot, is even deeper than previously believed. God knows why, but he is.

That the Mariana Islands lie some 2,000 Pacific miles from Shanghai, China, and not the 10-minute boat trip suggested here, gently hints at the rigorous attention to detail to come.

Anyway, down goes the vessel piloted by Lori (Jessica McNamee)… and down, and down, and deeper and down, until it penetrates the unchartered waters in which the megalodon, a 25-metre-long dino-shark thought to have been extinct for two million years, duly attacks it.

The only bald action hero who can save her, possibly because Bruce Willis is too old and Dwayne Johnson has too much professional self-respect, is the ex-husband played with mechanical competence by Jason Statham.

Mechanical competence: Jason Statham
2016 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc./ RatPac-Dune Entertainment LLC

Currently in beery Indo-Chinese retirement, he is shown in flashback failing to rescue a crew from a previous aquatic tragedy which left him with what a doctor diagnoses as “pressure-induced psychosis”.

For all that, they need him even more than he needs bargain-bucket redemption, and they need him right now. “Prep the helicopter,” declares project leader Dr Zhang (Winston Chao), father of oceanographer Suyin and grandpa to her teeth-grindingly precocious small daughter Meiying (Sophia Cai). “We must go to Thailand!”

Although his exact Thai location isn’t stated, that line is the moment to decide if you can persuasively tell yourself: “Phuket. I’m going to put my brain on standby, suspend disbelief and join The Meg on its frantic dive to the ocean bed of imbecility.”

For the literalist it may spew out too many anomalies for that. The least of them is why the departure for Thailand — again, not to be pedantic, a good 1,500 miles from Shanghai, so quite a strain on a chopper’s petrol tank — is accompanied by a Mandarin version of Mickey, the Toni Basil cheerleading anthem.

If Statham were playing someone called Mickey it would make some sense, albeit not much given the gulf between the American teenage object of a high-schooler’s lust and a middle-aged piece of beefcake with a growly “Lahndon” accent. But Statham is playing Jonas Taylor, so director Jon Turtletaub might as meaningfully have interrupted the sub-sub-sub-etc John Williams score with Lola, Leyla, Sweet Caroline or Robert De Niro’s Waiting (though almost certainly not for a part in any sequel to this).

After Jonas reneges on his avowal that “I don’t dive any more”, the quality of screenplay, acting and direction is bolstered by unconvincing CGI work to target The Meg, with a precision absent elsewhere, at nostalgists for the engaging slapdashery of the early Seventies disaster B-movie.

It flatters the depth of characterisation by nine-tenths of a dimension to describe the ragtag coalition of oceanic explorers — standard-issue comic relief black guy No 5 (c), bearded hipster doofus, Japanese shark snark, future Batwoman Ruby Rose as techie Jaxx — as one-dimensional.

Meanwhile, its victorious quest for a child-friendly rating robs it of the deliciously repulsive gore you have every right to expect when a monster to which a sperm whale is an amuse bouche sinks its 12-inch teeth into people. So little tension is generated that it’s no exaggeration to report having been more scared by peculiar fridge noises emitting from the Smeg. The one genuine shock is that it takes Statham as long as 44 minutes to remove his shirt and flash his pecs.

For all that, possibly thanks to an ironically self-aware crack at pastiche and possibly not (Bet Matt goes 2-9 on the latter), it will make you laugh. The weaker gags — the inevitable closing caption of “Fin”; a Yorkshire terrier, unaccountably named Pippin by its Chinese bride owner, paddling out to sea from the Jaws-homage packed beach — are intentional.

The more threatening to ribcage integrity are probably not. “It’s a living fossil!” says someone. “That living fossil ate my friend,” snaps back the rebuke. “Are you saying,” muses someone else, “are you saying we’ve opened up a superhighway for giant sharks?"

“In case what happened isn’t clear to you,” elucidates Jonas after a fatality between a shark rather longer than a cricket pitch and a slightly built human, “Man vs Meg isn’t a fight. It’s a slaughter.”

The Meg Premiere: Los Angeles - In pictures

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This oddly anaemic slaughter in the water may well prove this year’s The Greatest Showman, with box-office returns in inverse proportion to critical acclaim. With a Sino-American production budget of $150 million, it will need to be.

But it won’t be a contender for the new popular movie Oscar. If Spielberg were to suffer a blow to the head, heaven forbid, which cost him every ounce of his talent and 120 IQ points, and he then commissioned a Jurassic Jaws script from members of his traumatic brain injury support group, this is a fair bit worse than the movie he would make.

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