A Blah Review of ‘The Meg’ and more
The new shark in the water movie ‘The Meg’ is the very definition of a summer popcorn movie. It’s big, dumb, and wildly entertaining but brings absolutely nothing new to the table. You could see it with your kids, your parents, your bro buddies, your girlfriends, and all but the most jaded would come away smiling having had a good time. But it’s nothing revolutionary, it’s not gonna change cinema, it’s the mac and cheese equivalent for film.
‘The Meg’ stars Jason Statham who I find exceedingly likable no matter what he’s in. He plays a deep sea rescue diver with PTSD. Don’t worry, it doesn’t last long. 200 miles off the coast of China there’s an underwater marine biology lab that sent a sub to the bottom depths of the ocean only to need rescuing, and guess who gets the invite. Through some wonderfully bonkers psuedo science explaining, that mission winds up releasing a megalodon shark into open water and the fun begins.
While watching, multiple other films popped into my head as influences. The underwater lab, gruff hero, and submersibles all made me think of ‘The Abyss’. The billionaire financier, prehistoric monster aspects of course come courtesy of ‘Jurassic Park’. And then of course you have the obvious, ‘Jaws’, from which this movie cribbs a lot from. Fortunately those aspects come off more as loving homages rather than creatively bankrupt choices. This is a movie that embraces some of the goofier aspects, puts in some legitimate thrills, thankfully never tries to be scary, and puts a huge emphasis on being fun to watch.
I do wish ‘The Meg’ had of offered up one good gory kill. Other than blood in the water and some blubbery whale chunks, most of the deaths are quick one gulf affairs. The movie was also co-financed by a Chinese company, which no doubt led to casting Bingbing Li who is a major star there but relatively unknown here. I’m fine with that, except when she speaks English and it’s quite obvious she has no idea what these words coming out of her mouth are. I may not speak Mandarin, but I could at least hear proper emotions from her when she spoke it. Other than that, I had no gripes. This was never going to be the sort of movie I’d lavish praise on or even consider for best of anything. I just wanted to escape and be entertained and it did that in spades.
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So now let’s talk about the complete opposite of this movie. I finally got around to watching ‘Transformers: The Last Knight’ the other day. I actually enjoyed the first three in the series, for exactly the reasons I liked ‘The Meg’. Then came ‘Age of Extinction’, which was just a bloated bit of Michael Bay hubris, but it was still watchable, just not really enjoyable. ‘The Last Knight’ by contrast has got to be one of the most insanely incomprehensible piles of shit I’ve seen in a very long time.
I watch a lot of ‘bad’ movies, but it’s not often you come across one that looks like it was assembled in a blender. 20 minutes in, I paused the movie to try and explain to my wife what had happened so far, and I couldn’t do it. She wound up watching the rest with me, because much like a train wreck you want to turn away from, you kinda can’t. We paused the movie 3 other times during the course of the absurd 2 hour 40 minute run time to try and make sense of what we were watching, failing each time. At one point my wife said, “I understood ‘Lost Highway’ more than I know what’s going on here” and if you’ve seen that movie, that’s saying something.
There is zero character development. Literally none. At one point a roster of Decepticons is introduced like something out of the WWE, and that served as all the info you’d ever get. Marky Mark stars in this like the previous go around, but he’s barely even the same character. John Turturro and Josh Duhamel bring back their characters from the original trilogy, but it’s so random what they are doing that they could be in an entirely different movie for all I know. Poor Anthony Hopkins looks so lost in this, he’s the equivalent of Bingbing Li trying to speak words that are completely foreign. By the way, she was in ‘Age of Extinction’.
The movie takes itself way too seriously, especially when it comes to Bay’s typical insertion of the military into whatever project he does. For the love of God, just make a straight up military movie already and be done with it! When it tries for jokes, they are so out of place, so tone deaf towards stereotypes, they just make you cringe.
By the time the movie was over, I was just sitting there slack jawed over how much of a disaster it was. There was something like 5 editors listed, and I seriously doubt any of them even bothered talking to each other about what movie they were working on. We’ve all seen movies with varying aspect ratios (think The Dark Knight switching between IMAX footage and regular), but I’ve never seen one that had 4 or 5 DIFFERENT ratios that switched during the same scene. And it doesn’t even serve a purpose!
A 6th movie was supposed to happen but then Paramount canceled it and people actually wondered why. This movie, this is why. Michael Bay held a shotgun to the franchise’s head and blew it’s head apart into a bloody pulp, then tried to put piece it back together and call it a movie. Sorry, once it’s soup it can’t go back to being a solid. Trust me when I say, don’t torture yourself with seeing this. You may be tempted, but you’ll regret it.
