Summary:
Jonas Taylor squares off against a Megladon.
My Thoughts:
Ahhh, summer… the season of bonfires, grill outs, beach days, and bad blockbusters…
“The Meg” is a movie that I was looking forward to- (hear me out)- not in a “this looks great,” kind of way, but in a “wow, that looks so ridiculously stupid that I know I’ll end up seeing it” kind of way. I consider myself a cinephile (shocker), but I’m not above the occasional stupid blockbuster that panders to the lowest common denominator. Every once in a while, you need a movie to just watch and enjoy without ever having to think about anything. I (justifiably) anticipated this film would fall into that category of ‘big, dumb, but fun’ and went into the film with no expectations other than to laugh at some of the stupidity and over the top action. However, instead of being rewarded with a no holds barred B-movie, I was given a film that was indeed very stupid, but it took itself way too seriously, and as a result, the tone sucked any fun from the film at all. I was more bored than anything else.
“Just keep swinging, just keep swimming…”
Resident bada** Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham, “Crank”) is called to an underground research facility to help save a group of scientists being attacked by a 70-foot megladon. And of course, his ex wife is one of the people he needs to save.
Have you seen those AI written scripts circulating the Internet? You know the ones… scripts that are made after a AI Bot is forced to watch 1000 hours of Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives and then they ask the bot to write a script based off what they’ve seen. The bot then comes back with lines that sound like something Fieri might say, but the lines are also worded oddly enough that the dialogue sounds horribly stilted (“Prove to me you can Panini!”). Well, this movie sounds like a bot forced to watch a million hours of stupid action movies wrote the script. There are dozens of overly-clichéd moments, either in the dialogue itself or just in the actual story, and hundreds of moments that don’t make a lick of sense if you think about it for a moment. Normally, in a movie with a giant shark attacking people, I wouldn’t care about the film making sense, but the way this movie is written just begs us to take it seriously. If you want to make a movie about a giant shark, that’s fine- but why make it so serious? It’s a ridiculous topic? Why not rise to that ridiculousness?
I never in a million years imagined that I would ever say these words about anything, but I sort of wish this movie was more like “Piranha 3D” (2010). That movie, though incredibly stupid, knew the level of it’s own intelligence and had no problem playing into that dumbness. We were rewarded with bloody seas and carnage so brutal and over the top that I couldn’t help but laugh at the sheer body count. You know what we got in this movie? An hour and a half of scientists looking nervous before we were given a ten-minute shark-eating people scene; that’s not exciting! I didn’t come to this movie to see Jason Statham swimming around in a wet suit, I came to see Ruby Rose or Rainn Wilson get chomped in half. You think the plebeians of Rome would’ve been happy if they went to a gladiatorial area to watch an hour and a half of gladiators discussing the implications of a fight before they clashed swords? No, of course not. You advertised blood, and that’s what I came for, don’t give me Jason Statham trying to act empathetic; it doesn’t work.
Verdict:
I could keep going, but I wont. This movie is slow (in terms of pacing and intelligence) and frequently boring, but it does have one scene that is worth watching. As far as dumb blockbusters go, it’s about on the same page as “Rampage”- the other giant animal blockbuster that came out this year… (so much originality in Hollywood this year!). Flat acting, predictable action, and absolutely horrendous dialogue make this film one of the more forgettable movies I’ve seen in a while (and that’s saying something). Steer clear of these waters, my friend, there are much better films on the horizon.
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