Mark Reviews Movies: THE MEG

Become a fan on Facebook Follow on Twitter

Review by Mark Dujsik | August 9, 2018

This is the question: to show the shark or not to show the shark? It's almost impossible to talk about a shark movie without bringing up Jaws, because it set the standard and inspired a whole slew of rip-offs ("homages," if you're being generous). Many of those were made on the cheap, so, unlike its predecessor (which famously was selective in how often it showed the beast), the filmmakers kind of had to show the shark or other predatory animal, if only because of the percentage of the budget they put into the creation of the beast. This was usually an error.

The Meg has a bit more breathing room than those other movies, because it clearly has a decent-sized budget, it arrives in theaters more than four decades after the standard-bearing shark film, and the shark, created exclusively with computer effects, looks pretty good. We're also talking about a massive, prehistoric shark, about 75 feet in length and weighing who-knows-how-many tons. It's kind of impossible not to show the shark in this instance.

Director Jon Turteltaub tries in the early stages of the movie, when the hull of a nuclear submarine is demolished by giant, unseen teeth and a couple of submersibles are knocked around by the great, unknown thing on the other end of a sonar ping. It's a fun game, because we can imagine how Turteltaub, the screenwriters (Dean Georgaris, Jon Hoeber, and Erich Hoeber), and possibly the entire cast and crew were debating behind the scenes.

When should they show the shark? How long can an audience, which knows that there's a giant shark out there in the murky waters, go without receiving the inevitable payoff? If the filmmakers hold back for this long, just how crazy do the shark attacks following the lengthy tease have to be?

The answers to those questions are as follows: maybe a little sooner than they do here, just before the movie does show the shark, and pretty crazy. Yes, it takes some time, but the movie does more or less deliver on its promise of seeing a massive, prehistoric shark wreaking havoc on the modern world. This, though, is a case where "more" is preferable to any amount of "less."

The story mostly provides an excuse to assemble a group of archetypes and potential fish food. There's a prologue, set five years earlier, in which Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham), an expert in deep-sea rescues, first encounters the unseen monster.

In the present, a new research center is opening 200 miles off the coast of China. Morris (Rainn Wilson) is the money man, coming for a visit. Zhang (Winston Chao) oversees the facility, and his daughter Suyin (Bingbing Li) is its chief marine biologist. There are plenty of other characters of various degrees of importance, including Suyin's precocious 8-year-old daughter (played by Sophia Cai), but in a movie such as this, they mostly exist to be put in various degrees of peril at different points in the movie.

That peril begins early, as the crew of a research sub finds its way into the uncharted depths of the Pacific. The sub is attacked, and Zhang and Mac (Cliff Curtis), the head of research, enlist Jonas to save the crew, which just happens to include Jonas' ex-wife (played by Jessica McNamee). After the mission, the shark, of the thought-to-be-extinct species megalodon, escapes from its home and starts looking for food.

The rest of the plot involves a series of daring attempts to kill the monster. One has Jonas swimming toward the shark, hoping to shoot it with a tracking device—from a harpoon gun that's only accurate at 100 feet. Another puts Suyin in a clear, allegedly indestructible shark cage in order to shoot it with a lot of poison. The screenplay, based on Steve Alten's novel, features a lot of close calls, with the giant shark nipping at Jonas' heels as he's reeled in toward a boat or, apparently realizing that it can't break the plastic cage, trying to swallow the thing whole. That second sequence is admittedly clever in the way it plays with expectations and gives us a sense of the scale of this beast. Another moment, when things seem to be finished, is a surprising bit of misdirection—making us focus on one shark, before reminding us that there are other fish in the sea.

The movie obviously wants to be fun, and in its crazier moments (the bit with the cage, the shark's arrival at a densely populated beach, and a moment in which Jonas basically rides the damned monster), it is. Although clearly a CG creation, the shark is imposing, with its big dorsal fin poking out of the water. It seems to have actual weight and presence, and its teeth chomp down with a tangible sense of power (like the satisfying pop when it bursts a hamster-ball-like contraption rolling on the water).

The shark scenes offer enough variation to keep them from being repetitive, but the story is a bit of a drag whenever the shark isn't involved, which is, surprisingly, often. The inherent humor of the shark sequences doesn't carry over to the characters of The Meg, who don't possess the winking acknowledgment of how crazy and silly all of this is, and the big, unthinking eating machine isn't quite enough to make up for the movie's lulls.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products

Buy the Soundtrack (Digital Download)

Buy the Book

Buy the Book (Kindle Edition)