[currently available On Demand, iTunes, Amazon Prime Rental]
Director: Jon Turteltaub
Starring: Jason Statham, Bingbing Li, Rainn Wilson
Sometimes movies change the way you live your life. Think about how Blair Witch Project made you refuse camping trips for a few years. Or how Alien forced you to reconsider your life as an astronaut. Hell, The Shining gave me a fear of being alone in hotel hallways. Ladies and gentleman, you can add The Meg to that list. Then cross it off, rip that tiny peace of paper from the list, burn it, use the energy from the fire to charge your remote control and watch Dam Sharks, a film about sharks that use human bodies to create dams. I have not seen Dam Sharks, and therefore can’t endorse the movie, but I can confidently say it is better than The Meg.
The Meg is about a shark. The shark is big. Huge even. It swims around killing people for a while and then it is killed. The movie, however, realizes that it’s killed the only villain it’s got, so it decides to make more megs. Three to be exact. And they all die in a series of boring ways.
Now I know what you’re saying. “TJ, this movie was supposed to be dumb. You went in expecting Carrie and are upset because you got Scary Movie.” WRONG. This movie makes Piranha look like Citizen Kane. You see, Piranha knew what it was doing. It embraced the camp. The Meg tried to take itself seriously. They tried to give you Jaws Dreyfus, but failed, and instead you got Piranha Dreyfus. Piranha Dreyfus is fine if you know you’re watching a comedy, but if he’s just randomly inserted into a drama(?) it all feels lost. There’s no good one-liners. There’s no good laughs. And honestly I don’t even see where the laughs were supposed to be.
I was looking for pictures to use for this review and came across the following fun fact on IMDB. The last quote in the quotes section is the following:
Mac: “What’s that?”
1 of 4 found this interesting
That one sad person thought that quote was interesting. All it took was a “What’s that?” to make the guy watching The Meg think for a minute.
Is it Watchlist-worthy? Not this shark dudududududududududu
