Something to get your teeth into
Well, hardly... but at least this preposterous, prehistoric shark provides a feast of fishy fun
The Meg Cert: 12A 1hr 53mins ★★★★★
At a basic level, The Meg is a very silly film about a group of scientists accidentally unleashing a giant shark that most people believed had been extinct for more than two million years on an unsuspecting world. Of course, it being summer, a large proportion of that unsuspecting world is inevitably at the beach, happily treading water, blissfully unaware of the new – and very large – dangers that now lie beneath.
Scientifically preposterous, it’s a classic B-movie that’s not particularly well acted, features some truly terrible lines – ‘That living fossil just ate my friend’ – and some of the toothy visual effects are downright comical.
But park your brain in a low summer-holiday gear, load up with popcorn, and The Meg, while never great, is certainly a lot of end-of-pier fun. It’s not a film to be taken too seriously. After all, it’s got Jason Statham in it.
It’s also a film that visibly demonstrates Hollywood’s new-found appetite for attracting Asian audiences and Asian production money, particularly from China. Much of the underwater action takes place in Chinese coastal waters, it’s a Chinese beach resort that comes under particular attack, and the film’s leading lady – and love interest – is played by the Chinese actress Bingbing Li.
Will that deter audiences here? I wouldn’t have thought so: after all, Li – playing a very modern, kick-ass single mother – is decent enough and, besides, most of us have only come to see the shark, the megalodon, or Meg for short, all 25 whopping metres of it.
How does it come to be released on an unsuspecting world? Deep-breath time. Backed by a larger-than-life billionaire (Rainn Wilson) a state-of-the-art underwater laboratory has been set up to test an outlandish theory proposed by the good Dr Zhang (Winston Chao) that at great depths the bottom of the sea isn’t the bottom of the sea at all but a ‘thermo-cline’, a frozen layer concealing even greater depths below. And guess what, he’s right. Only those greater depths aren’t empty.
Which is bad news for the first submersible that sails into them. Very soon it comes under violent
attack, is badly damaged and marooned on the sea bed at a depth of over 11,000m. Only one man has ever mounted a successful rescue mission at a depth of over 10,000m and he – after a rescue went tragically wrong – is now a divorced drunk living, beer bottle permanently in hand, in Thailand. Ah, that’ll be Jonas Taylor (Statham). He’s the only man in the world who believes the Meg is a living creature and – oh yes, it’s his ex-wife who just happens to be piloting the wrecked mini-sub. Anyone anticipating one of the best ‘I told you so’ moments, however, will find the writers are ahead of them. To be fair, director Jon Turteltaub has at least half his tongue firmly in his cheek, and there are one or two very funny lines. Jonas saves so many lives, so often, I lost count, and we’re so familiar with the shark genre that the end does drag a bit. Acting-wise, this is no one’s finest hour and, in this age of ultra-realism, some of the visual effects do underwhelm. But there’s still a lot of fishy fun to be had.
‘Jonas saves so many lives, so often, that I lost count’