The Meggie

BitDepth#1159

MARK LYNDERSAY

THERE ARE things you should expect from a “summer” movie, a film created by Hollywood to take advantage of teenagers with time on their hands looking to escape heat and humidity for 113 minutes or so.

There have been some poor judgments unspooled for this task, but some truly memorable bits of confection were created in its service.

The American summer vacation gave us Animal House and Vacation from National Lampoon, Die Hard (yes, it’s Christmas time in the film), Speed and Men in Black.

These are not films that will change the nature of the world or correct its many injustices, but hey, they are nifty to watch. Even today. In the rainy vacation period of TT in 2018.

Horrors from the deep began in June 1975 with Peter Benchley’s Jaws, brought to the screen as an instruction manual in mounting terror by Steven Spielberg.

The Meg, a new entry in the monster from the depths of the ocean genre, surged to the surface of cineplexes worldwide over the last week.

It’s a shark film. A big shark film. Part of a noble tradition of misunderstanding these elegant predators of the sea that reached a proud and enthusiastic nadir with the Sharknado sextet of films.

The Meg decides to carve out new territory by taking itself so seriously in the face of overwhelming absurdity that it becomes an exercise in pondering the eternal question of the self-aware exploitation flick, “No, they didn’t.”

Short answer? Yes, they did. Repeatedly.

Jason Statham stars as Jonas Taylor, a deep-sea scientist/pilot/diver/angry man of some sort who has mastered the fine art of staring with grim disbelief at the goings-on, representing the audience manfully.

Statham doesn’t get to kick anybody in the face in the film, though he does get to stab a megalodon in the eye. This is deeply unfortunate, and not only for the surprised monster shark, because several of the actors seem desperately in need of a well-aimed foot, at the very least aimed at their posteriors.

BingBing Li, a major star in mainland China, seems unable to navigate her role, which requires her to – unsuccessfully as it turns out – demonstrate lust for Statham’s half-naked, fully pumped body, fear at being knocked around in the ocean depths in a submersible the size of a large car, or, indeed, any emotion that might logically follow the presence of a multi-ton prehistoric shark.

Oh, and that’s the premise of The Meg, the tender, engaging story of the sudden appearance of a long-presumed extinct member of the Carcharocles megalodon family, a species of dinosaur era shark that was, let’s just say, really big. With powerful jaws. And big teeth.

So it’s the classic tale of a tiny man with a diving mask versus a 70-foot, multi-ton killing machine, a heart-warming story of courage in the face of overwhelming danger and the totally insane urge to dive into ocean waters that have been verified as hosting eager jaws of certain death.

Why is this creature chasing after people who are krill to its firetruck-sized jaws when it’s capable of breaking the spine of a whale?

In place of a serviceable story, we get callbacks to Jaws the first and second.

A familiar little boy pleading to go into the water with his iced lolly over his mother’s objections.

A cute little dog in the path of the killer fish.

The Meg is underwritten by lunatic science and cynical accounting pressed into the service of a cinematic alliance between China and the US to produce nothing less than its sequel.

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there