Nothing deep in this giant shark showdown
Some cheering news as the 2018 summer blockbuster season rounds into its home straight: the mega-shark is not a giant crock. In fact, The
Meg delivers exactly what its advertising campaign promises, with no unexpected surprises, pleasant or otherwise. See! Jason Statham locked in combat with a 75ft prehistoric maneater for two hours, or thereabouts. Thrill! At our bullet-headed hero repeatedly snatching victory, or at least survival, from the literal jaws of defeat. Gasp! At a genuinely enticing action movie premise, executed with charm and reasonably persuasive CGI. Swoon! At the realisation that in a few years, every second $100million film might look like this, thanks to the new influx of Chinese money (The Meg was produced by Flagship Entertainment, a joint venture between Warner Bros and China Media Capital).
Pay attention and you can see an aesthetic of sorts taking root. The Meg unspools in a spotless, lightly glazed, style-free style of cine-esperanto, with its chaste, chirpy multinational cast and little in the way of culturally specific quirks. None of this suggests a second golden age of blockbusting, exactly. But Jon Turteltaub’s film is significantly better than recent flavour-free Us-china co-productions like Pacific Rim Uprising, Skyscraper and The Great Wall – which means that while these ventures’ capacity to produce great pop art remains unproven, at least we now know they can work.
The plot, which is astonishingly based on a novel, has Statham as the Captain Ahab-like Jonas Taylor, a former naval officer enlisted by Jack Morris (Rainn Wilson), an Elon Musk-type billionaire nincompoop, to save the crew of his stranded research submarine. Jonas quickly surmises what is amiss: the craft has been downed by a Carcharocles megalodon, a species of giant shark thought to have been extinct for two million years. He knows because five years ago, a similar thing happened to his submarine, leaving most of his men dead – making this less of a mission than a rematch. Teaming up with oceanographer Suyin (Li Bingbing), Jonas straps into an appealingly Thunderbirds-esque mini-sub and drops into the breach.
From here on in, The Meg divides cleanly into three parts: the rescue, the battle with the beast, and lastly a beach resort finale featuring the sub-aquatic hungry-cam pioneered by Spielberg in Jaws, in which beachgoers’ legs are shown dangling appetisingly, like chipolatas crying out to be chomped.
As you might expect, Statham is at his best when flying, swimming or just growling solo – as a former diver and member of Britain’s national swimming squad, the role bullseyes his comfort zone. His cutesy chemistry with Li also passes muster, just about. The primary heat source in the crew, however, is Orange is the New Black’s Ruby Rose, whose punky engineer Jaxx is the most engaging supporting presence by far.
A 12A certificate signals a lack of graphic devourings up front, although the climactic beach set-piece is low on imagination too. In fact, The Meg’s most thrilling moment doesn’t even involve the Meg: it’s the moment the submarines discover the creature’s prehistoric domain, which lies beneath a soupy layer of ice-cold fluid previously thought to be the ocean floor itself. In that sense, at least, there are no depths to which The Meg won’t sink. But as trashy cinema goes, it all feels a little too well-behaved.