Blockbuster needs a bigger boat

In the 43 years since “Jaws” scared a generation of cinemagoers out of the water and took a US$470 million bite out of the box office, few shark movies have made much of a splash.

The increasingly poor sequels to Steven Spielberg’s 1975 masterpiece launched their own era of corny aquatic monster movies, from The Asylum’s “Sharknado” series to more sober but uninspiring releases like “Deep Blue Sea” and “The Shallows.”

“The Meg” lunged out of the deep in US and Chinese theaters on Friday with the aim of giving the genre back its teeth with a 2-million-year-old megalodon five times the size of a great white.

The Meg, in fact, is a prehistoric underwater dinosaur, a kind of supersized shark that went extinct more than 2 million years ago. According to scientists, they could grow up to 18 meters long.

According to Hollywood producers, it’s more like 23 meters or more. In “The Meg,” a megalodon’s dorsal fin sticking out from the water looks from afar like a catamaran.

Naturally, history could not keep such a predator so perfect for today’s movies all to itself, especially when one could be strategically found somewhere in the Pacific, conveniently close to the world’s second largest movie market, China.

Based on Steve Alten’s “Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror,” “The Meg” has been in development for two decades, only to finally emerge as American-Chinese hybrid production this year.

“When you’re a kid, you think there’s a monster under your bed or in your closet, and monsters haunt us,” American actor Rainn Wilson, one of the movie’s stars, said. “They’re there in our darkest dreams. “They are in the Jungian shadow part of ourselves. Humanity’s in some dark times right now and I think the monster movies and post-apocalyptic monsters reflect that.”

Jon Turteltaub’s movie stars Jason Statham (“The Fate of the Furious” and “The Expendables”) and Chinese actress Li Bingbing (“Transformers: Age of Extinction”).

A deep-sea submersible — part of an international undersea observation program — has been attacked by a massive creature and lies disabled at the bottom of the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean with its crew trapped inside.

Former deep-sea rescue diver Jonas Taylor (Statham) is drawn out of self-imposed exile by a visionary Chinese oceanographer, Dr Zhang (Winston Chao), against the wishes of his daughter, Zhang Suyin (Li), who thinks she can rescue the crew on her own.

But the main draw in “The Meg” is obviously the giant shark which, after years stuck at the bottom of the sea, is awfully hungry.

Indelible impression

There are the expected close scrapes, surprisingly good production design, PG-13 rated chompings and fluctuating levels of even giant-shark-movie plausibility.

What is it about sharks that inspires such absurdity in plots?

Much of “The Meg” aims for a familiar popcorn mix of frights and ridiculousness that may well do the trick for cheap August thrills, or those who pine for, say, “Deep Blue Sea.”

“The Meg” is best when it acknowledges its derivativeness, just one more silly shark movie in an ocean full of them.

Its finest moment is when Statham, having willingly jumped into the water near the megalodon, channels “Finding Nemo” character Dory and murmurs to himself: “Just keep swimming.”

But it will take their combined efforts to save the crew, and the ocean itself, from this seemingly unstoppable threat — a prehistoric 23-meter megalodon.

Wilson — best known as creepy salesman Dwight in NBC’s “The Office” — remembers being around 12 years old when he first saw