The Meg Review

It's time now for our annual summer shark blockbuster, which is a tradition I'm totally on board for as I really love my shark movies. Now shark movies have been consistently popular ever since "Jaws" helped invent the summer blockbuster in 1975, but we've had a bit of a renaissance in the last couple of years thanks to "The Shallows" in 2016 and "47 Meters Down" in 2017, both of which made around $50 million total at the domestic box office, which is a solid total for a shark movie given that the highest grossing shark movie outside Jaws, which made $260 million, is "Jaws 2" with $81.8 million followed by "Deep Blue Sea" with  $73.6 million, those number not being adjusted for ticket price inflation. The big story for "The Meg" is that it's going to swim right passed those numbers and rather easily take that second spot behind "Jaws," which is crazy because heading into August I was thinking it was going to open around $15 million, the range that both "The Shallows" and "47 Meters Down" opened in. Heading into the weekend, official projections had it pegged at around $20 million with the most generous saying $25 million. I don't think anyone expected it to hit the $45 million that it actually opened to, giving it the highest opening weekend for any live-action shark movie.

This all means that I wasn't the only one excited for this movie. From the moment I heard of this movie's premise, I had a huge childish grin on my face. Jason Statham starring in a movie about a Megalodon? That just sounded like pure gold. There's a reason why Jason Statham vs. Dwayne Johnson in the recent Fast and the Furious movies was so great. That was two of Hollywood's current best action stars. Earlier this year I found much pleasure watching Dwayne Johnson fight a giant crocodile in "Rampage" followed by him climbing the world's tallest building to save his family in "Skyscraper." Even though both of those movies were extremely dumb movies, the fact that they were so dumb was kinda the point and Dwayne Johnson totally owned both roles. And now I get to top the summer off by watching Jason Statham fight a Megalodon? A prehistoric shark that experts say was probably around 40 to 60 feet long? Sign me up. Usually our villains in these movies are the great white sharks, which average around 15 to 20 feet long. And that's scary enough. The fact that this movie exaggerated the total a bit to make this Megalodon 70 to 90 feet long is even better. I mean, who cares about logic and science in this movie? The bigger the shark, the better!

If you happened to check out the reviews for this movie on Rotten Tomatoes and got a bit nervous that "The Meg" stands around the 50 percent mark, feel free to take a sigh of relief because some critics are too overly critical when it comes to these dumb action movies. They were nice to "The Shallows," giving it a 78 percent score, but "47 Meters Down" is rotten at 55 percent, as is "Rampage" at 52 percent and "Skyscraper" at 48 percent. I think all four of those movies are enjoyably dumb movies. In terms of our trifecta of shark movies, I think "The Shallows" is still the best of the three, but "47 Meters" down was quite the pleasant surprise and "The Meg" fits nicely along with these two, giving me mostly what I was looking for when I went in. I'll quantify what I mean by "mostly" here in a bit, but if you go into "The Meg" expecting to have fun with a giant shark terrorizing the protagonists of the film, that's exactly what you're going to get and you should walk out pleased. If you're one of those people that are reading this and are thinking that I'm crazy for enjoying all these dumb movies and you specifically hated both "The Shallows" and "47 Meters Down," well I'm not sure what to say to you other than "The Meg" isn't going to be the one to change your heart.

When it comes to shark movies, there are two very different styles of shark movies that come with two very different ways to critique them. The gold standard for each style is "Jaws" and "Sharknado." Taking on "Jaws" first, "Jaws" is a movie that takes itself very seriously. The movie is focused heavily on building up the characters in the movie and relies a lot on the acting and the story. The movie does this rather beautifully with lots of great characters who experience fascinating character arcs woven together to make a beautiful film that almost stands on its own without the shark. The shark itself is teased early, but doesn't make very many appearances early on and you don't actually see the shark til much later in the film. Yeah, sure, you can credit some of that to the lack of proper technology in the 70's, but this is also a classic monster movie trope that works quite well. If you make the audience care about the story and the characters, then the terror will be even greater when the monster shows up. On the flip side of things, you have "Sharknado," which doesn't give one iota about story, characters or acting. Their goal was to create the most absurd thing possible, throwing crazy shark moments at you early and often, which just so happens to laugh-out-loud hilarious.

Given that the "final" Sharknado film gets released on the Syfy Channel this month, I'll have plenty more to say about this franchise later on. I put final in quotation marks because it's hard to believe Hollywood when they say something is the final chapter, especially when it's so easy to throw together a Sharknado film. But given that this sixth movie is titled "The Last Sharknado: It's About Time," we'll take them on their word for now and wrap things up when the time comes around. But for now put that thought in your back pocket because "The Meg" does not attempt to emulate "Sharknado," but rather it goes for the more riskier route by trying to be the next "Jaws," which means I am obligated to be slightly more critical than I was wanting to due to the fact that replicating "Jaws" is a more difficult task to nail down. If you're looking for a movie where the Megalodon terrorizes people early and often, leaving story and characters behind to focus on this shark, you're going to be out of luck. What the movie instead tries to do is spend almost the first half of the movie justifying why a prehistoric shark thought to be extinct at least 2.6 million of years ago is actually alive and breathing. I didn't care about any of that, but the movie thought I would, hence the problem.

We start off by a crew ship discovering a secret area of the ocean that no one knew existed, which I thought was a subtle, yet clever way of introducing a potential franchise, if they make enough money, rather than including some post credits scene showing that there are more Megalodons out there. Which, by the way, there are no post credit scenes, so feel free to leave when the credits start rolling. But anyways, I did facepalm a bit at this beginning when the movie tried to be mysterious with what was out there. Something big damages the little explorer ship, which the movie's opening scene suggests also happened five years previously, yet we're left in the dark as to what this could be. This causes them to need to go on a rescue mission, which they decide they need to recruit Jason Statham, because he's the only living survivor from the past mission. I was sitting in my chair thinking, "Spoiler alert, movie! Said creature is a Megalodon!" Because, surprise, I actually knew what the title of this movie was. I even knew the premise and watched the trailer when they started advertising this. No reason to be mysterious. They could've shown the Megalodon early on, then stepped away to build the story, rather than setting up a mystery.

After said mysterious beginning, we finally get a glimpse of the Megalodon and I was in awe because this thing looked awesome. But that was just a tease as we proceeded to spend a lot more time with the Megalodon hidden from the crew. I was fine with this approach, but it meant that there was a lot of weight thrown on these characters and I wasn't necessarily sold on all of them. The idea was to make you care about all of them so that the terror would be greater later on, which as I've said earlier is a great approach so long as you succeed in making people care. Luckily the movie had Jason Statham and he has a lot of charisma and energy. He managed to put the whole movie on his back and make you care, which was good because I don't know if I would've cared otherwise. There is a long list of supporting characters which includes Bingbing Li, Rain Wilson, Cliff Curtis, Winston Chao, Ruby Rose, Page Kennedy, Robert Taylor, Olafur Darri Olafsson, Jessica McNamee, Masi Oka and adorable young Sophia Cai. All of them are decent in the movie, but I have to admit that without Jason Statham acting as the glue holding them all together, I may have just seen them all as shark fodder rather than useful characters. Even so, when the movie focused too much on them, I got bored.

When we finally got to the part of the movie where the Megalodon was out in the open and actively hunting down the crew while wandering dangerously close to the Chinese coast, I believe it was, this is where the movie really picked up and became the movie I wanted it to be. But it did take longer to get to that point than I wanted. And even when we did get to this point, the movie still managed to be a bit choppy at points in terms of plot (shark pun not intended there). Thus it's not until the actual finale of the film that the movie becomes extremely entertaining. There's plenty of good moments leading up to this point, but I do think the movie as a whole could've benefited from being polished up a bit and perhaps even been 20 minutes shorter as it did clock in at 113 minutes. That's not an inherently long movie, but it is when the movie doesn't always know how to fill the time. But if you manage to make it through the first two acts, the final act is well worth the wait. Even though there's way too much of it in the trailers, I still had an absolute blast. Is this is a movie where you could watch on Netflix and fast forward to the end? Perhaps. But if you like shark movies, I still think it's worth heading out to see this Megalodon on the big screen. My grade for "The Meg" is a 7/10.