This film cannot make up its mind what it wants to be. Is it a black comedy, is it a thriller, is it a horror movie, what in blazes is it?
The plot is as follows: Scientists working at a remote research facility off the coast of China discover an unknown region below a gas cloud at a depth below that of the Mariana Trench, and soon get attacked by a mysterious creature Miocene and Pliocene Epochs. Disgraced diver Jonas Taylor (Statham) comes out of hiding and goes down to rescue the team and finds out that the creature is Megalodon, a giant predatory shark that lived between 23 to 2.6 million years ago and died out before the last Ice Age. Spoiler Alert, the shark begins attacking and eating people and racks up a fairly sizable body count before it is finally defeated.
Now I have to give credit where it is due, the shark is shown at closer to its natural size than other films have done in the past (see here for more on that topic). Even when one appears that's seventy five feet long rather than sixty, it still looks more natural and less like a photo-shopped Great White. The So-Bad-It's-Good movie Shark Attack 3: Megalodon had it so huge that it could swallow a good-sized life raft in one go. Here, it's just large enough to tangle with a giant squid.
The fights with the shark itself are pretty thrilling and awesome--in a stupid kind of way. The climatic scene, for example, features Taylor chasing the shark through through rocky tunnels before stabbing it in the eye. That was very well done. And it was unnerving seeing a diver in a shark cage get stuck in the animal's maw (yeesh!). The humor is also good at times, with the best moments being references to Shark Week.
However, that's where my praise for this movie ends. The movie's problems are as follows: The humor may be good, but the shark kills unintentionally fall into this category, being treated as a punchline rather than horrifying. This is not helped by the fact that the film glosses the deaths over for the most part.
Making things worse is the surprising lack of gore. This may seem strange coming from someone who doesn't like gratuitous amounts of blood and guts in a movie, but I found that to be a disappointment. I enjoyed Jaws despite all the blood and guts, but then again there's bound to be blood whenever a shark attacks someone. Apparently it was originally planned to be an R-rated bloodbath of a movie, but there was some major executive meddling and it got demoted to PG-13. If they had stuck with the original idea, I think they would have had something truly terrifying.
The Meg's biggest problem is the characters. They are a huge part of the reason the movie seems to be unable to make up its mind about what it is. With the possible exception of Statham, most of the actors don't seem to know what they're supposed to be doing exactly, and just walk around with wide-eyed expressions of confused nervousness. But the worst offenders are Jonas ex-wife Lori (Jessica McNamee) and his girlfriend Suyin (Li Binging) Lori has little to no facial expressions beyond Stone-Faced Zombie and Stepford Wife Smiling even when she takes a screwdriver to midriff; and Suyin goes around looking like she's scared of everything.
And Neither Lori nor Suyin had any depth at all. This movie is based off of a novel, and in the novel Jonas' ex-wife is a power-mad woman seeking publicity. In the film, she's blandly amiable. There's mention that Jonas and Lori were bad couple, but hwy is never explained. The writers wasted a perfectly good opportunity for some good drama.
I saw this film with my boyfriend and he wanted Suyin to just die, for which I do not blame him. Suyin is the worst love interest I have ever seen in a story. There's no chemistry between her or Jonas; their love scenes are little more than shy glances with no real emotion behind them. She's a terrible mother as well. She lets her daughter Meiying (Sophie Cai) have free run of the research station, and doesn't seem to discipline her when she should (do you really want your eight-year-old to be saying the word "a-hole"?). And she's just plain dumb, trying to shark dive with the Megalodon, in a cylindrical cage. Sorry, but Nigel Marven's design was better.
Overall rating: 4 1/2 out 10. Fun action, bad characters. Goofy humor, sloppy story.
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