Movie review: The Meg has Jaw-dropping levels of stupidity

How was The Meg? I laughed a lot. More than I expected for a shark movie. It came to a point where I could barely stop laughing at it.

Key phrasing there, "laughing at", not "with". The moments were not meant to be funny, but after being bombarded by stupidity after stupidity, the laughter was involuntary. And that is the problem. The Meg is stupid when it should have been ridiculous.

And it is not as though Jason Statham is any stranger to the ridiculous. The always watchable action star has done two Crank films and is part of the Fast & Furious franchise, all of which gleefully lean into the nonsense.

But like his FF co-star Dwayne Johnson found with last month's China-US co-production Skyscraper, you can stretch physics only so far before you get stupid. And not in a good way.

This film - Meg being short for megalodon, the gigantic ancestor of the great white shark - yearns to have Jaws-like credibility. The 1975 film is still the benchmark.

(Listen to the reviewer's longer, rantier take in the Double Feature Movie Podcast)

Maybe The Meg did not want to get caught in that net of near-parody like Piranha 3DD or the seemingly endless Sharknado series. Shame. This could have been a blast otherwise.

Well, Statham fighting a giant shark looks good on paper but so did Snakes On A Plane.

But the shark is too big for a man to fight it. In Jaws, it was large but you'd believe a man could stop it. Here, it is like watching ants attack a shoe - and arguably not as thrilling.

The film wants to appear smart but lurches from improbability to plot hole to vacant CGI non-thrill. The real problem for the makers is that real water does not play the way they want.

So here, submarines perform handbrake turns and have race car-like acceleration. Can a boat haul up and hoist a giant shark? Apparently. Can an even bigger giant shark outswim a man? Not according to this. Or maybe this ancient beast is secretly asthmatic?

Aside from the lone beacon of charisma in Statham, you have Winston Chao and Li Bingbing as the father-daughter sea-based scientists. That there is only a 13-year age gap between the two in real life is blatant. Without Chao's grey goatee, the pair would look like siblings.

Everyone else, Rainn Wilson, Ruby Rose and lesser-known others make up the usual suspects. Arrogant billionaire, cool tech girl, wise cracking side-kick, angry doctor who hates the hero then comes around just before becoming shark food, the smart but slobblish tech guy. 

The dialogue and scenes feel so cliched and familiar from thousands of B-grade disaster movies, and it is put together with little-to-no style by director Jon Turteltaub.

And yet The Meg has stunned with its success, raking in over US$147 million (S$202 million) globally. But then, it had no competition and a PG13 monster movie with a watchable star is going to get bums on seats during a lull.

Will it continue for a second week? Who knows? It is a case of Schrodinger's shark.

Coincidentally, after watching the film, I spotted the novel of The Meg in a bookstore. On the back, one critic called it “Jurassic Shark” - riffing on the classic Crichton dinosaur title.

Well, the movie version of The Meg deserves likewise, but in this case just reverse the letters in Park and you’ll have a much more accurate title.

- 2 Ticks (Well, I suppose it made me laugh)

MOVIE: The Meg
STARRING: Jason Statham, Li Bingbing, Winston Chao, Rainn Wilson, Ruby Rose
DIRECTOR: Jon Turteltaub
THE SKINNY: Jonas Taylor (Statham) is recruited by oceanographer Dr Zhang (Winston Chao) to save the crew in a deep-sea submersible from an unstoppable threat: A gigantic pre-historic shark known as the megalodon.
RATING: PG13