Starring: A very large shark, and Jason Statham

Directed by Jon Turteltaub

Warner Bros. out now

 

When an exploratory sub breaches a layer separating the seabed from a trench populated by a 75-foot shark, only the Stath can save the day.

Remember that scene in Back to the Future Part II where Marty is in futuristic 2015 and a cinema is showing Max Spielberg’s Jaws 19? Well, I’m going to assume if that had been the reality then The Meg would be very much like 2018’s Jaws 20. I’m not even going to blame The Meg on being a Jaws wannabe, as it actually does feel like part of the series, but so far down the line that any originality or concern about characters has long been dispensed with.

The most amazing thing about The Meg is the size of the budget, which allows for some impressive shark effects and underwater base sets. It’s a sizeable budget which unfortunately ran out when they planned to do a second draft on the script, which sadly never happened. And so we get characters with the most cliched of back stories all thrown together in the most unlikely of ways. Of course Jason Statham’s washed out Jonas Taylor is going to be lured out of retirement to save his ex-wife and lock horns with the man who accused him of abandoning others in a previous drama, because it’s that sort of film. It was already a cliché when Robert Hays’ Striker was this character in 1980’s spoof Airplane!

And yet, despite all of this nonsense and ridiculous dialogue, it is still good fun. It would have benefitted from being more ‘adult’ like Piranha 3D so that the gore quotient could be upped, but instead it’s fairly benign, with most of the limb-severing happening off camera. Another issue is that the shark is so big that it’s no big deal if it chomps down on a human – they look like small fry in its jaws.

Verdict: Not so much Jurassic Shark as Jurassic Lark, this is more Jaws 3D or Jaws: The Revenge than Spielberg’s 1975 Classic Original. Lacking in the bite of Deep Blue Sea or The Shallows, or the knowing ridiculousness of the Sharknado series, it’s a fun but ultimately derivative and daft couple of hours. As Peter Griffin frequently says to his daughter in Family Guy: ‘Shut up, Meg!’ Yeah. That. 6/10

Nick Joy