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The Meg (2018)


Sometimes movies come with such a ridiculous conceit that you have to watch them. The sheer chutzpah it takes to make a movie about THAT demands that you make time for them. There is nothing, however, quite like a ridiculous sounding movie that ends up taking itself too seriously. A movie that wants so badly to tread into "drama" territory that it forgets to have fun. That it betrays the very reason you gave it your attention in the first place. The Meg (2018) is one such movie.

I. What Is It?

This is the story of a research crew that accidentally unearths a megalodon in the South China Sea. People do stupid things. People are eaten. Etc.

II. Disappointing

This movie should be Fucking Dumb. But it isn't. It's just Disappointing. It's premise is patently absurd, and the marketing campaign promised us a silly monster movie romp. What we got was a shittier Jaws (1975).

The movie goes to ridiculous lengths to try to make us care about these characters (we don't, anyway, which just adds insult to injury), and to try and marinate the film in a sense of drama. Those efforts essentially amount to a waste of time, ballooning the run-time and over-complicating the story For Reasons. By the time we get to the crowded beach, with The Meg bearing down on the crowd of unsuspecting people, the movie attempts some silliness, but it all rings hollow. You can't be a gloriously self-aware romp AND a drama. At the very least this film can't. And it never should have tried.

The film wastes an entirely game Jason Stathem. He should have been delivering upper-cuts to that fucking shark. But he doesn't. Not once. And you KNOW he would have. And that's a shame.

The film even establishes a cutting-edge underwater lab... and then immediately leaves and disregards it. Like, we get it, you wanted to do Deep Blue Sea (1999) but wouldn't commit.

III. Demystifying

Do you know what made Jaws so fucking scary? We hardly ever saw the shark. Spielberg was incredibly smart about the WHEN and the HOW of the audience seeing the titular monster. In The Meg, we see that shit all the time. We see just how much of a CG horror-show it is. We should have got a gliding underwater dark patch. We should have seen that fin. We should never have seen the actual megalodon until it was too late. The fact that the scientists aboard that absurd underwater lab know exactly what it is also robs the monster of its mystique. When you can name and understand a thing, you lose some of the primal fear of the unknown.

IV. Too Long

The Meg is a film that needs to be a cool 80 minutes. Maybe 90. It actually runs 113 minutes. The movie wastes its run-time establishing a tragic backstory for Jason Statham that never really gets capitalized on, and a stupid fake-out Other Big Shark (yeah, there are TWO big sharks... because). If your movie is going to push two hours, your story has to earn it. The Meg invents reasons for its plot to push minutes, and those plots are never more than insulting to our intelligence.

V. Should You See It?

No. Don't waste your time. Go and watch Sharknado (2013), or Deep Blue Sea (1999), or Jaws (1975). Those films are everything The Meg is not.

Miscellany

Nah.

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