The Meg is just not bad enough to be a classic

I’ve said on here before that I like my genre films to know their way round the genre they are operating in. They need to give the audience what it expects, and then come up with a way of making it unexpected. The Meg succeeds in this but only up to a point.

This creature feature is possibly the giantest of giant shark movies – the monster here is a megalodon, a prehistoric shark which grew to around 70 feet long. Thought to have been extinct for two million years it’s been disturbed by a research team trying to prove that the ocean has a false bottom – really! – and has now made its way into the open ocean.

Before that it will be snacking on a smorgasbord of genre movie stereotypes. There’s the burned-out case seeking redemption (Jason Statham), the hard-nosed scientist whose work comes before her emotions (Li Bingbing), the ruthless billionaire funder (Rainn Wilson), the no-nonsense team leader (Cliff Curtis) and the obligatory shark bait (you can work them out for yourself). There’s also a cute child (Sophia Cai) and a dog – I’m giving nothing away by revealing they both survive.

This is a film almost twenty years in the making. Directors such as Guillermo del Toro, Jan de Bont, and most recently Eli Roth have been attached. Finally, it was entrusted to Jon Turteltaub, the very embodiment of a safe pair of hands. The result is a film that does exactly what you expect it to but not a lot more.

It hits all the marks and the underwater scenes are quite impressive, but it doesn’t go that little bit further. It’s curiously lacking in humour; even Jaws (1975) managed a laugh or two along the way.

Jaws is also, I would suggest, a big part of this film's problem. The spectre of Spielberg’s classic, and to a lesser extent Deep Blue Sea (1999) hang heavy on The Meg. There are scenes which are so obviously inspired/stolen that there isn’t much Turteltaub can do to freshen them up. The film’s self-awareness hits the wall in a couple of key moments and instead of any fresh twist we get ‘will this do’.

His take on the crowded beach sequence, for example, is shot more or less exactly as Spielberg’s – there’s even a whiny kid who wants to go into the water – but because he’s already told us what’s going to happen next the scene lacks tension.

Statham is good and gritty and, given his aquatic background, it’s surprising it’s taken movie makers so long to get him into the water. But even he can’t handle dialogue like: ‘Man versus Meg isn’t a fight. Its slaughter.’

Actually a few more lines like that and a few more tongues wedged into cheeks wouldn’t have been a bad thing. As it is The Meg is just sufficiently good to be entertaining, but not bad enough to be a classic.