Statham oozes charisma while doing battle with a giant shark in this enjoyable romp let down by its cliche-infested script
There’s an argument to be made that all you really need for a halfway decent summer action movie is Jason Statham and something for Jason Statham to punch. Any film that fulfils those basic criteria can’t be all bad. In The Meg, Statham’s target is a 70ft prehistoric shark, or megalodon, hitherto imprisoned under an icy barrier of hydrogen sulphide in an ocean realm deeper than the Mariana Trench. It’s tempting to assume that all fin flicks are direct descendants of the big daddy of them all, Jaws. But The Meg shares as much DNA with the Godzilla tradition of the monster from the deep, awakened by mankind’s hubris and now chucking around submarines like a dog with a chew-toy.
It’s an enjoyable romp, certainly. It’s just a pity that, having secured two such promising key ingredients as Statham and a giant dinosaur fish, the film-makers don’t do more with them. The screenplay feels as though it was assembled from an action-movie dialogue bingo card. In the first 10 minutes alone we get “There’s something out there!”, “Oh my God!”, “We got this!” and “What have you done?”. Statham is the kind of movie star who sweats neat charisma, but in the role of deep-water rescue specialist Jonas Taylor, he is left all at sea by the banality of some of his lines.
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