EVERY NOW and again a movie comes along where it appears the creators had a title and then tried to build a story around it. The Meg - short for Megladon, a giant dinosaur shark - is certainly one of those movies.
There is a weirdly specific genre of shark films. It all started with Jaws, probably one of the five best films of all time, but that was also the genre's high point. For every Open Water there is a Sharknado, for every Deep Blue Sea there is Three Headed Shark Attack (which does have the best tag line I’ve ever read “More Heads, More Deads!” ). So this is the latest attempt at the shark genre. This is Die Hard on water, but instead of terrorists it is a giant prehistoric Shark - you must admit that is quite the pitch. Does it live up to the pitch?
Everything with the shark is good fun. But oh boy do we spend way too much time with the boring one dimensional characters. We even spend some time, maybe the first 20/30 minutes, without even Jason Staham. Come on! That is an unforgivable sin the movie does not really recover from. The Stath v shark scenes are great, but I’m not sure the juice is worth the squeeze here. It is infuriating that this movie is longer than 90 mins to be honest. Another thing I noticed is no one in The Meg appears has been on a boat before. People are constantly falling into the water from a stable position.I came into this movie wanting to like it. It is rare we get an original, non-sequel, non-super hero block buster, but honestly it just was not as much fun as it should have been. It certainly does not flash its fangs due to its 12A rating and maybe that is what it would have taken it from an OK film to a fun film. Over all I’d change the name of this movie to The Meh.
