FILM OF THE WEEK
The Meg Cert: 12A; Now showing
It scares me when Jason Statham smiles, and he does quite a lot of it in this slightly tongue-in-cheek underwater monster adventure. It’s big, ridiculous and good fun.
Jonas Taylor (Statham, absolutely unsmiling) appears in the prologue which sees him abort a dangerous rescue mission because he believes the nuclear submarine they’re rescuing is being attacked by something unknown. Accused of being crazy, he retires to Thailand to drink. Several years later, and a state-of-the-art deep sea exploration centre funded by a dodgy billionaire (Rainn Wilson), begs Taylor to return. One of their submarines has been attacked and stranded deeper than any other sub has ever gone, the crew are trapped and only Jonas can save the day.
Everyone is initially wary of the loose cannon, but soon he proves himself, smiles at lots of people and everything is great. Until it turns out that what attacked the submarine has managed to escape the sub-ocean in which it lived, and this 80ft shark, the Megalodon, is loose in the Pacific. Cue more day-saving for Jonas.
Director Jon Turteltaub keeps it light, the film knows what it is and pays homage to its obvious parent Jaws but also The Abyss (Jonas’s ex-wife is one of the sub crew he rescues). The cast is more gender and racially representative of the blockbusting adventures of old (Li Bingbing, Ruby Rose, Winston Chao, Masi Oka all play good roles), but it also ticks the genre boxes with humorous black man (Page Kennedy), fat man (Olafur Darri Olafsson).
This is a film that doesn’t take itself too seriously, it’s not a classic movie but it is great fun and not as gory as Jaws, so fine for most kids.