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THE MEG; A Professional Scotsman Review #21

Kyle Titterton
Aug 24, 2018
5 min read

#MINNOW SIZED SPOILERS# Watch Trailer

The problem with any shark movie is that you're going to be compared to Jaws [10]. Sadly, when the last major landmark in the genre is the 6th film in the Asylum Sharknado series, The Last Sharknado: It's About Time, you've got problems. Hell, Jaws is a masterful film period, genre be damned and in a way, because of all the dreadful shark based movies recently, it's not only made the oeuvre popular in an hipstery ironic way, it's also lowered the bar considerably. The Meg should really be compared against these - not least of all the dreadful sequels to Jaws itself - notably the laughably naff Jaws 3D [4] to which is bares closest resemblance. Fun shark film fact - Jaws 3D was originally going to be a comedy called Jaws 3 People Nil. That's genuinely funny - though the accidental comedy that is Jaws 3D is better than most actual comedies. Yet whilst The Meg itself is certainly comedic in places - particularly from an all but winking Rain Wilson as an Elon Musk-ish type character - it also rather refreshingly takes itself semi-serious on occasion.

Quint's speech from Jaws: "Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, Chief. We was comin' back from the island of Tinian to Leyte, just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in twelve minutes. Didn't see the first shark for about a half an hour. Tiger. Thirteen-footer. You know how you know that when you're in the water, Chief? You tell by lookin' from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn't know... was our bomb mission had been so secret, no distress signal had been sent. Heh..."

[He pauses and takes a drink]

It's bizarre seeing the deliberately bad films made by The Asylum (also of Megashark Vs Giant Octopus fame) remade with good SFX and actual proper actors. Oh, and with a finished script too! And before you make the cheap joke that Jason Statham isn't an actor - well, it doesn't matter. He's box office gold - Britain's answer to The Rock - with charisma to spare and can act when he wants. The fact that he doesn't want to act in The Meg doesn't matter - he's perfect for this. He's heroic without trying and they even make sure to make a virtue of his rockin' bod in a bare chest scene - for the ladies and the guys - he is after all something of a gay icon following his slippery, almost-nude, oil fight in The Transporter [7]. Though his romance with his Chinese co-star, Li Bingbing, is luke warm (they dinny even kiss!) I didn't come to see hot people smooch - I came to watch a big monster shark bite people in twain.

"...They didn't even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, Chief, sharks come cruisin'. So we formed ourselves into tight groups. Y'know, it's... kinda like ol' squares in a battle like, uh, you see in a calendar, like the Battle of Waterloo, and the idea was, shark comes to the nearest man and that man, he'd start poundin' and hollerin' and screamin', and sometimes the shark'd go away... sometimes he wouldn't go away. Sometimes that shark, he looks right into ya. Right into your eyes. Y'know the thing about a shark, he's got... lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be livin'... until he bites ya. And those black eyes roll over white, and then... oh, then you hear that terrible high-pitch screamin', the ocean turns red, and spite of all the poundin' and the hollerin', they all come in and they... rip you to pieces..."

[He pauses]

The start is amazing! I'm a sucker for lost worlds and the undersea one they create is plausible, haunting and beautiful. The opening drama works okay and the reveal of the titular Megolodon, an aquatic antideluvian apex predator thought to have died out two million years ago, is absolutely incredible - pure visual cinema. You see it from a character's POV and it comes after a fabulously tense encounter with another monster and at this point I'm thinking we're onto a B-Movie classic... with A list SFX! What is this - Tremors [10] at sea? Sadly it never keeps this mystery and tension going though there's a lot of other fun set pieces - just nothing as cinematic and intelligent as this again. And, oh man, I hope you like cheese with your fish becuase the romance is pretty consistently cringe inducing. The fake CGI shark is waaaay more convincing.

"Y...'know, by the end of that first dawn... lost a hundred men. I dunno how many sharks. Maybe a thousand. I dunno how many men, they averaged six an hour. On Thursday mornin', Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland- baseball player, boatswain's mate. I thought he was asleep, reached over to wake him up... bobbed up and down in the water just like a kinda top. Upended. Well... he'd been bitten in half below the waist. Noon the fifth day, Mr. Hooper, a Lockheed Ventura saw us, he swung in low and he saw us. Young pilot, a lot younger than Mr. Hooper. Anyway, he saw us and come in low and three hours later, a big fat PBY comes down and start to pick us up. Y'know, that was the time I was most frightened, waitin' for my turn. I'll never put on a life jacket again." But hang on Kyle you started by comparing this to Jaws 3D - why have you dropped that thread? Well, to be honest I was hoping you'd forgotten about Jaws 3D. Okay, here goes - both films have large underwater marine stations, a hilariously massive shark, a bit where the shark swims amok in a bay filled with holiday goers and a few other nods I won't spoil. One weird omission is that this would have been better as 3D probably. I'm amazed they didn't go for that and actually showed some restraint. Speaking of which I wish they'd gone a bit more overboard with the blood and guts as most of the gruesome violence is perpetrated to the shark. That's not to say loads of people don't die and if that's what you're going for you won't be disappointed.

"So, eleven hundred men went into the water, three hundred sixteen men come out, and the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945."

[He pauses, smiles, and raises his glass]

"Anyway... we delivered the bomb."

FINAL ANALYSIS: It's very silly but takes itself serious enough to get you invested if you're up for it. The Asian setting is nice and it's sometimes funny. It's still crazy thinking back to how suspense filled, beautifully scripted and crafted the masterful original Jaws was - and it's not a fair comparison. The real comparison here is against the likes of Jaws 3D and the Asylum movies and in that regard it bites the competition's head clean off - albeit fairly bloodlessly in PG-13 fashion. Ach, actually I'm being a tad unfair to Jaws 3D... it's way better than the sequel that came after it; Jaws: The Revenge, where the shark has an honest to God personal vendetta. In fact Jaws: The Revenge is so bad it makes Jaws 3D look like Jaws.