REVIEW: There's Something Fishy About 'The Meg'...

THE MEG

It’s a giant shark movie.

But, what, really, is a giant shark movie? A rudimentary theme-park ride in moving-picture form? Or an expression of deeper existential angst, our fears of being tiny fodder in the face of nature, and effectively meaningless in the grander cosmic scheme? What are people really paying for, and participating in, when they pay their money to watch a movie in which Jason Statham saves the world from a prehistoric giant shark?

Maybe they’re just paying to watch Jason Statham save the world from a prehistoric giant shark, no thorny philosophical questions asked. Thorny philosophical questions are the province of thinking, and The Meg doesn’t want you to think much at all. If, indeed, you pay your money to watch a movie in which Jason Statham saves the world from a prehistoric giant shark, rest assured you — OMG SPOILER ALERTZ! — watch Jason Statham save the world from a prehistoric giant shark.

When Statham shows up to save the day — a grizzled, drunken man with a painful past — Rainn Wilson’s tech-bro billionaire says: “He looks heroic, and he walks fast, but he’s got a bad attitude.” It’s supposed to be something like a wink to audiences, a commentary on all the clichés at play herein. But, speaking aloud someone’s cut-rate characterisation is all-too-telling of this film, in which actors embody stereotypes, mug in reaction-gifs, and deliver dead-eyed lines as if everyone’s an advertisement’s catchphrase.

The plot is, um, that there’s a giant prehistoric shark. Oh, and, there’s some people on a boat, of course. They are the ‘international’ cast now familiar from shitty B-movies; and, as in horror-movies, they’ll die off one-by-one, aside from a handful of surviving favourites. There’s a terrible child actor, Cliff Curtis actually getting to talk in a Kiwi accent, Ruby Rose, and Li Bingbing not just in a headlining role, but speaking in Mandarin for stretches.

Giant prehistoric sharks, evidently, can cross borders of language and culture; can play to audiences in any multiplex’s air-conditioned nightmare. Especially when those giant prehistoric sharks are just set in scenes that blatantly run back the shots of Jaws. It’s at this point that we should mention that the director of this is Jon Turteltaub, maker of Cool Runnings and both National Treasure movies. There’s little here to draw attention to the filmmaking, which is as generic as the story. And, so, the story goes, 'til we arrive at Statham playing hero, piloting his underwater submersible in a dogfight with said giant prehistoric shark.

Where, in classic monster movies, the monster is some manifest symbol of mankind’s ills or fear of the natural world, here there’s no attempt to muster up any kind of parable; there no scientist playing God or plutocrat out to monetise a monster, no sense that mankind is being punished for some greater cosmic sin.

Instead, there’s barely much of anything; this two-hours of mind-numbing, time-killing made to be experienced, then completely forgotten.

BOOK CLUB

Coming soon to the airline seat screen of someone sitting in the row in front of you, Book Club is an old-dames-getting-frisky comedy in which a quartet of screen icons — Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, Mary Steenburgen — are the members of, um, a book club. When they read the 50 Shades trilogy, it inspires all manner of minor comic-shenanigans, screenwritten life-changes, and behaviour that results in a host of happy pairings-off before the credits roll. The central idea is that old people still have sex; which is played for both chuckles and 'you-go-girl' inspirationalism. But there’s nothing approaching daring or danger, here, only a non-threatening marriage of tropes and conventions.