Jason Statham fighting a Megalodon sounded like a winning combination for a great popcorn film.
Unfortunately a great popcorn film The Meg is not with its overall boring and eye rolling story.
Directed by Jon Turteltaub, the film stars Jason Statham as rescue diver Jonas Taylor who is called in to help rescue his ex-wife Lori (Jessica McNamee) from the bottom of the ocean, where they encounter the ferocious Megalodon.
Speaking of the relationship between Lori’s and Jonas, you would think this would have some importance to the plot, right?
Wrong!
Because these two being exes has literally no impact whatsoever.
Lori could have just been a random side character and nothing would have changed.
She does not move the plot forward after she gets trapped, she does not serve as a love interest for Jonas, she has no point being in the movie.
Jonas’ actual love interest, Suyin Zhang (Li Bingbing), is no better either as her and Jonas’ relationship holds no investment.
Their relationship basically goes from them saying, “I hate you” to them saying “wow, you’re pretty hot” in less than a minute.
There is a moment in the film, about half way through, where Suyin says something along the lines of, “let me do what I’m good at.”
This line made me pause for a moment because I realised I had completely forgotten what she was good at in the first place, which had definitely been established earlier.
She was that forgettable.
And this is The Meg‘s big problem, the characters.
Rather than spending the majority of the film seeing the Meg destroy things, we instead spend that the time with the movie’s various characters.
This would not be a problem if these characters were remotely interesting but they are not.
The majority of them are just shark fodder for the Meg to devour and it got very easy to guess which of them was going to get chomped.
There was a death scene where I was literally counting down the seconds to the guy getting eaten.
It was so obvious that it was going to happen.
If there was one word I could use to describe The Meg it would be “cheesy”, and not the good kind that a movie like this should be.
There are multiple instances of cringe worthy dialogue, eye rolling scenes, and the one good character moment of the entire film is ruined when it was revealed to be just an act.
The one saving grace of The Meg is its final action sequence, which gave me exactly what I wanted: Jason Statham fighting a massive shark.
This final fight was entertaining enough to salvage the film slightly, however, it does not excuse the bore fest that came beforehand.
The Meg is an overall boring film that has forgettable characters and action.
The only reason to see it is for the final ten minutes.
THE REVIEW MONSTER 