Angry Animal Watch: The Meg (2018)

Watched:  08/31/2024

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Turtletaub

A while back, SimonUK and I covered this movie in an episode that gave me false belief for what our numbers were going to be at The Signal Watch PodCast.  Just 16 episodes in, and it really took off, with folks enjoying the lively debate over a movie that featured a large shark and Statham.

I think, on a second viewing, I'm much more sympathetic to Simon's point-of-view.  You can absolutely see what this movie could/ should have been, and instead, it's a bit of a toothless exercise in never giving you quite what you want out of a movie about a large shark causing problems for people.

My suspicion, then and now, is that the film had a heavy infusion of Chinese money - which is how we got Li Bingbing as the costar alongside Statham - a setting off the coast of China, and a movie that met Chinese censorship rules with no problem.  

What this movie needed to do was be a bloody mess.  It was not.  

The closest I can compare is if you had a Friday the 13th movie and Jason just kept wandering through Camp Crystal Lake, and the counselors kept yelling "there he is" and running away, occasionally falling into potholes to their death.  And when Jason came upon a mess hall full of campers he just walked through the middle, doing no harm.

Statham clearly wishes he was in a different film and he and Bingbing have almost zero chemistry for a movie that wants them to have hints of romance - but it just doesn't make sense in the middle of a crisis where people are dying around you to fall for someone, even a someone with great hair and make-up like Bingbing, or a head like a battering ram like Statham.  

The movie continually *hints* that we'll get the carnage some of us were hoping for.  They knock off a pair of whales.  There's menacing shots of a shark in the sea.  But when it comes to bumping off the horrendous Ruby Rose, no dice.  

Because water is largely a void, they also have a very hard time showing how big the shark is, which is largely the point of the film.  And so it can seem the shark is whatever size the shark is in that moment.

There are neat vehicles and ideas in the movie, but the certainty that Statham and Bingbing will be fine shades everything else.  

Weirdly, my favorite bits in this movie include elementary-school aged children, one of them a main character, one of them a boy who is probably more like me at that age than I care to admit, floating stupidly in the water with a popsicle.  

I'm not even sure this is in a top 10 shark movies category.  It's fine.  But it doesn't hold up super well on a second viewing, even years apart.  But it is good "let's sit and talk over this movie" movie.