Action/Adventure
THE MEG
CAST: Jason Statham, Rainn Wilson, Li Bingbing, Winston Chao
DIRECTION: Jon Turteltaub
1 and half stars
When I first saw the trailer of ‘The
Meg’ I thought it was a reboot of ‘Jaws’, the popular monster shark-film
series. However, it’s a Chinese-American coproduction that has got
nothing to do with the series and is instead based on a novel of
American writer Steve Alten. Action star Jason Statham is Jonas Taylor,
a deep-sea rescue diver, who has to fight a predatory shark of massive
and mythical proportions. If you’re an action film buff, the mere
mention of Jason Statham versus a shark will make you anticipate a scene
where Statham is punching the animal with his bare hands. So seeing
Statham’s heroics mostly restricted to just pushing buttons and staring
through screens make us wonder why the star’s tough-as-nails demeanor
has been underused in a monster movie that could’ve done with a lot more
of the regular Statham-ness.
For once, ‘The Meg’ isn’t a dramatically
deep and existentialist underwater exploration movie where the lead
actor gets a chance to show his inner Daniel Day-Lewis. It is a
full-blown potboiler, packed in with so many layers of storyline that it
stretches into a slack and boring affair without inspiring any moments
of suspense or high tension.
The story begins somewhere off-coast in
China at a high-tech deep sea research center run by a team of
scientists looking for life beyond the bottom surface of earth’s
deepest point, Mariana Trench. Winston Chao plays Dr Zhang, the leader
of the research team, and Rainn Wilson plays Morris, the American
billionaire who has funded the operation. When the film opens, Morris is
visiting the place for the first time. As Dr Zhang and his daughter
Suyin (Li Bingbing) give him the grand tour of the place, a three-crew
submarine exploring the bottom Mariana Trench encounters a massive deep
sea creature and loses contact.
They waste no time in locating the
washed out deep sea rescue diver Jonas Taylor (Statham) and asking for
his help to get the submarine team out of the bottom of the ocean.
Meanwhile the scientists at the research center assess whether or not
they have angered a monster which appears to be a megalodon, the
prehistoric 60-foot shark believed to be extinct a long time ago.
Director Jon Turteltaub does not offer
anything new to the genre. The film’s overall aim appears to be a
children-friendly family entertainer so many sequences don’t so much
shock and awe but only try to please the crowd.
The CGI is average too. There aren’t any
exciting moments that leap at you or catch you off-guard. For the
majority of the film you just sink in your seats and watch the
mechanical storytelling unfold. Even when the titular monster Meg makes
an on screen appearance, it fails to stir mayhem and dread. The
monster shark deserved a better development. Revealing its monstrosity
through just expository dialogues does nothing to make the creature
scarier when the visuals don’t complement the verbal build up.
Besides Statham’s scowls and frowns that
make up his rusty performance, the rest of the film’s international
cast comes across as if they signed up to the project for the paycheck
not because they found their characters interesting. Li Bingbing’s Suyin
is so inconsistently written that we see her quickly switch from
someone who is skeptical of Statham’s Jonas for his rash methods to
someone who is swept off her feet as soon as she sees Jonas’ ripped
body. There are many deliberate moments to romantically involve Jonas
and Suyin but each of these moments feels forced and out of sync with
the overall movie.
‘The Meg’ is a big budget movie with low
energy and no refreshing ideas to make it stand out. This is the kind
of film which would’ve worked better with a focused story and edgier
thrills. In its current shape, it doesn’t have the teeth to grab the
audience till the end!
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