You walk into The Meg half ready to sneer, armed with all your righteous cineaste skepticism: here comes Jason Statham wrestling a dinosaur fish, and if that’s not enough to send you running for Bergman, nothing is. I wanted to hate it. Honestly, I did. And so, the first surprise: it’s possible, in this perverse landscape where studios toss millions at shark movies, to actually enjoy yourself despite yourself. The shame isn’t the ludicrous premise or the overblown CGI — it’s how you’re grinning by the time the third aquatic monstrosity explodes out of the Pacific, Statham bracing himself for another winking one-liner.
Jon Turteltaub, that journeyman of amiable commercial exuberance, directs The Meg with the same breezy, glossy confidence he once applied to national heirlooms in National Treasure. Give him a giant prehistoric shark, a submarine research facility with all the plausibility of Tomorrowland, and a script made from the spare parts of every underwater monster movie since fifties Universal, and he’ll still find a way to keep things humming along the rails. If you’re searching for tension, look elsewhere — The Meg is connective-tissue moviemaking, a series of genre comforts strung together by spectacle and Statham’s beefy magnetism.
Let’s not kid ourselves about the script. “Formulaic” seems far too kind. You can see the story beats lumbering toward you through the murk like the dorsal fin of the titular behemoth. We are introduced to Jonas Taylor (Statham), a rescue diver haunted by trauma and clad in that self-aware, blue-collar nobility that’s become Statham’s house style. Five years post-freak accident, he’s dragged back to the deep for one last job — an entire underwater research collective has unleashed a megalodon into their pansy little kingdom, and it’s up to our man to save the day. (You can practically hear the screenwriters checking off boxes on their script outline, enjoying it a little too much.)
But here’s where The Meg gets slippery: its predictability is, perversely, part of the appeal. It moves quickly, flinging characters into the shark’s maw with all the gravity of a Super Bowl halftime commercial. The quips fly, the action crescendos anew every ten minutes, and if you see the “dramatic sacrifice” telegraphed from three scenes away, who cares? You’ve come for the spectacle, the same way filmgoers once lined up to see Vincent Price in 3D, or to throw popcorn at the screen. Sometimes you want to be pandered to — The Meg is comfort food disguised as high-stakes carnage.
It is Statham, inevitably, who spins this camp into something resembling joy. His Jonas is part everyman, part action god, and he delivers his lines with the bemused professionalism of someone keenly aware he’s fighting a cartoon. While the rest of the cast — Li Bingbing, Rainn Wilson, Ruby Rose — is trapped in the “hey, it’s that actor!” zone, mugging valiantly through roles thinner than the hull of a submersible, Statham alone gets to smolder, brood, and dive-kick his way through the narrative. His is a charisma that turns paste into peanut butter, and Turteltaub, to his credit, knows enough to let him carry the show.
Where the film tries harder, it stumbles. The earnest attempt at human drama — rescue missions, emotional backstories, sacrifice for the greater good — is as shallow as the script’s environmental commentary. When these moments arrive, you feel the movie sweating, desperate to wallpaper over its artificiality with Big Themes: mankind versus nature, bravery in the face of titanic odds. But when your main course is a 75-foot shark, it’s better not to garnish with parable. The truest pleasure comes from the absurdity itself.
If there’s grace in Turteltaub’s hand, it’s the way he lets The Meg straddle camp and blockbuster. One minute we’re deep in the underwater gloom, shrieks and jump scares milking an ancient formula for all it’s worth; the next, we’re treated to the kind of slapstick carnage that nods its head at Sharknado and Deep Blue Sea, as if to say: “Yes, we know, but doesn’t it feel good to laugh?” There are moments where the movie wants to have it both ways — frightened and giggling, dramatic and ridiculous — and the tone wobbles, but who’s counting? Even the dialogue, straight from the cut-and-paste school of Hollywood cliché, can’t kill the chewy fun of seeing Jason Statham head-butt a sea monster.
There’s a minor tragedy in the missed stakes, the undercooked supporting players, the lines so stiff they could be delivered by mannequins. But perhaps, in a movie like The Meg, that’s all par for the course. You don’t wade into these waters expecting Chekhov; you’re there for the grinning, greasy satisfaction of seeing the beast surface, the crowd cower, and the hero stand tall, muscles and sarcasm gleaming under the bioluminescent lights. Turteltaub isn’t here to reinvent the wheel — only to make sure it spins in neon colors.
You could call The Meg a serviceable summer spectacle with all the nutritional value of a midnight cheeseburger, but you’d also have to admit: you finished every bite. There’s joy in the largeness, the loudness, in a blockbuster that isn’t afraid to be nakedly silly. And when compared to limp quasi-dramas like Under Paris, or the high camp of Sharknado, it occupies its own sweet spot: escapist and aware, never once pretending at gravitas.
So yes, I tried to hate it, and failed. If you come to The Meg wanting catharsis, you’ll leave hungry; if you come for a raucous, disposable slice of aquatic melodrama — the kind of flick that leaves you howling at the screen and texting your friends to see it next Friday — you couldn’t ask for a better catch. In a world grown used to irony, it’s refreshing that a film this mechanical can still make you laugh, squirm, and forgive yourself for loving the trashier side of cinema. There are worse sins than giving in to a well-made shark movie.
And to those who scoff at this kind of pleasure, all I can say is: dive in. The water’s fine.
