An underwater exploration team discovers a 70-foot megalodon
​shark in uncharted waters and must destroy it before it kills them all.

HORROR

The Meg (2018)

Directed by Jon Turteltaub

Written by Dean Georgaris, Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber

Starring Jason Statham, Bingbing Li, Rainn Wilson, Ruby Rose,
​Cliff Curtis, Winston Chao, Page Kennedy, Robert Taylor,
Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, Jessica McNamee, Masi Oka

​Based on the novel by Steve Alten

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Connor Eyzaguirre

August 11, 2018

6/10

There will never be another shark movie on par with Jaws, though I think a lot of people were hoping that The Meg was the one. The real question is how the hell Warner Bros. managed to take a movie about a 70-foot shark terrorizing Jason Statham and make it boring. That's The Meg's biggest problem. It's just so dull. It suffers from a PG-13 rating, which holds it back from the gorefest it was obviously meant to be back when the project was still in the hands of Eli Roth. By making it PG-13, the film loses everything that could've made it great and turns it into a lukewarm way to end the summer.

Statham plays Jonas Taylor, a rescue diver with a past who is recruited to save his ex-wife from a submarine trapped 11,000 miles under the ocean in an area that has not been explored. Inevitably, Jonas and his new team encounter the megalodon, a prehistoric giant shark thought to have been extinct. What follows is a passable action/horror flick that acts as the ghost of a much better movie. None of the characters are really given anything to do besides Jonas and his love interest Suyin (Bingbing Li), and the climax is downright ridiculous. In one of our podcasts, I predicted that this film would end with Statham punching the shark. Believe it or not, I was almost right.

The Meg could've been the true spiritual sequel to Jaws, but producer interference and the insistence of a PG-13 to appeal to the kids brought it down to a level that's nearly unwatchable. The CGI isn't great, the monster isn't all that threatening, and the characters are one-dimensional. Overall, I'd say The Meg is a colossal disappointment and one of the biggest letdowns of the summer movie season.