2018’s summer blockbuster, The Meg, swam into cinemas with the hype it was going to be a fun shark movie. The marketing campaign sure seemed to suggest that - colourful posters, tongue-in-cheek slogans galore. However, it turns out The Meg wasn’t as self-aware as the marketing team thought it was going to be and instead, it just ended up being a dumb shark movie.
With the concept being about a huge prehistoric shark coming back to terrorise Chinese beaches - and with Jason Statham being the lead - you’d think there would be a lot of humour surrounding it. However, The Meg takes itself way too seriously. The closest Statham gets to cracking a joke is singing ‘just keep swimming’ while out in the water. Page Kennedy is clearly aimed at being the comic relief but the guy has no funny lines and instead just insists on commentating on what is happening, as if that’s a joke.
The characters themselves are bland and, quite frankly, there are too many. Page Kennedy’s DJ does not need to be in this movie. Jessica McNamee’s Lori and Olafur Darri Olafsson’s ‘The Wall’ just become baggage after they are rescued in the film’s first set piece.
Rainn Wilson’s billionaire Jack Morris is a mystery. In some instances, he’s shown as a friendly and rather tuned-in guy, offering solutions to the meg problem but then, on the other side of the coin, he’s shown as a bit of an asshole, asking where the wi-fi is while half his team is getting attacked at the bottom of the ocean. It seems that even Wilson doesn’t seem to know how to portray his character.
Some of the more action-oriented moments work. The rescue mission and the first attempt to kill the meg are tense sequences and Statham always plays a hero we like to root for. The effects are good enough for the type of film this is supposed to be and the story isn’t terrible - in fact, there is a nice twist or two along the way. Not exactly the self-aware Jaws it should’ve been. Instead, The Meg takes itself way too seriously and has a cast to spare, but manages to keep us interested with some good underwater action sequences. Score: 46/100