Review: The Meg

“When humans travel below the depths of ocean to discover a new world, they unwittingly unleash a series of inconsistent movie cliché’s that attack audiences around the world”

Jaws can’t possibly go unmentioned in this review. Jaws is a classic that I regard as one of the best films of all time. Sure, the shark looks fake, but the characters felt real and whilst the ending might be a little bit far-fetched, the film overall feels very real. Jaws is the shark film that started shark films, and has remained the one all shark films are measured against. None have come close to Jaws, and the Meg certainly hasn’t either.

Meg feels like a film that has been kicked around by studio executives the parking lot and the resulting film is a hotchpotch of a appeasements and compromise. The end product doesn’t know what it wants to be. There are moments of seriousness, (attempted) character development, moments of sadness and loss, intertwined with moments of fun action silliness, but then all wrapped in lots of terribly lazy and far too hammy scenes that just ruin the whole thing. The trailer to Meg probably best summed all of this up, by showing us a fun action packed shark movie, but with the jarringly unsuitable song Beyond the Sea playing over the top of the trailer.

Does my fin look big in this?

What works: The sharks in many scenes, (not all) look great, and the budget has been well spent. There’s a number of entertaining sequences and the sets are impressive. The underwater shots look very realistic too.

What doesn’t work: The film reminded me of many recent Marvel movies, in that it tried to have a serious character moment, but the whole time the scene is occurring, your mind is still processing the cheese of a previous scene in which a terrible joke was played out. You can’t have it both ways. You can't have a serious moment if you've treated everything else as a joke. Many of the characters are terribly annoying and get in the way of the film. Again, Jaws had very real feel to the characters and so you cared about them when they went on the water. This film, like many shark movies, treats many characters as simply fish food, which doesn’t help build tension.

And tension is what is seriously lacking in this film. The famous Jaws theme worked so well, because the film was aiming to build suspense and play on our fears. It barely showed the shark but with interesting characters, it didn't matter. This film doesn’t play on our fears much at all, instead setting up extravagant chases and action scenes in the water, where the shark might as well be a submarine or missile chasing the heroes, rather than a living creature.

There are several references to Jaws. There is an entire scene devoted to parodying the Kintner boy, as well as the dog that disappears beforehand. Jaws 3 also gets a, albeit subtle reference, with the crew often zipping around under water in yellow vessels, which of course look much better than the terrible 1983 film.

Jaws 4 even gets a reference, with a call back to the yellow banana boat attack. Sadly, despite many helicopter scenes above the shark filled water, we did not get a Jaws 2 reference.

The cast are mixed. Jason Statham works very well in the action scenes and has enough charisma to carry most of his other scenes when he’s not being chased by a 50 foot shark. However, some moments require more serious acting, as the film moves into unexpected territory, clearly left over from an early draft, or the book, he struggles to give enough emotion.

Bingbing Li is fine in her role, but she has some terrible dialogue and her romance with Statham is terribly forced, cliché and cheesy.

Rainn Wilson plays the worst character in the film. He is a billionaire who has provided over a billion dollars for the facility the film is set in, yet it’s not until he turns up to see it that he starts to ask questions about what it actually does and hopes to achieve. He also then goes into full B grade movie mode half way through the movie and it was not hard to see where his story line was headed.

Am I an overly cheery 8 year old who's here to make the audience feel warm and fuzzy?

The rest of the cast fill out as either ‘good actor capable of more here for a pay check’ or ‘comic relief that may or may not get eaten depending on the test audiences' reaction'.

The film struggles against what direction to take throughout, and as a result, it has a number of sections that are quite dull. The lack of tension isn’t offset enough by the action when it does arrive. The sharks look pretty good, certainly better than many other films of the same type, but the film as a whole doesn’t rise far enough above the Sharknado films that it tries to be better than, mainly because whilst they gave the effects the budget it needs, they still brought along the poorly written characters that Tara Reid could have played. The plot also lacks serious logic at times, however, I have found that many of my issues with logic were apparently covered in the book, but not included in the film.

Fans of these films should have look I guess, but it surprisingly won’t seem much better on the big screen than watching it on a large TV at home.

The five bearded questions:

1. Was it worth a cinema trip? Kinda.

2. Would I See It Again at the Cinema? No

3. Would I buy it on Blu-ray: (only films I really love get bought these days) No. 4. Do I Recommend people see it? Sort of.

5. Any cheese/ Disney style bullshit?: (such as jokes wedged in at serious moments, because fun!). Yes.