I knew when I headed into The Meg was I was getting.
I have heard too many people trying to compare this movie with Jaws but I knew from watching the trailer that this looked more like Deep Blue Sea than jaws — and that was just fine with me.
Based on the novel by Steve Altman, The Meg is about a group of scientists who are exploring the bottom of the ocean outside of China — all on the dime of a billionaire (played by Rainn Wilson).
However, when the team is investigating a theory that the perceived bottom of the ocean is not the bottom, but a cloud cover that has an entirely unknown world beneath it, things got bad. What first looked like a miraculous discovery turned deadly when something attacked the submersible and left them stranded with a limited supply of oxygen.
A former deep-sea rescue diver named Jonas (Jason Statham) is called in to help, and while he refused at first, the second he learned it was his ex-wife, Lori who piloted the stranded submersible, he agreed.
Now, there was a problem because the last time Jonas was deep underwater, the ship they were rescuing was attacked by something huge and he got the survivors out, leaving two behind to die. No one believed him that they were attacked by something and he was deemed crazy.
He wasn’t crazy. The beast that attacked the submersible was a prehistoric Megalodon. None of that matters.
What matters is that he saves two of the three people in the submersible (which he is then attacked for leaving someone behind again) but then the Meg is able to get through the fog and is in the live ocean, looking for something (and someone) to eat.
The rest of the movie shows the crew trying to find and kill the Megalodon before it reaches a populated beach area and slaughters untold numbers of people.
This is what you want from a giant killer shark movie — the shark eating people and then the heroes chasing it down and killing it.
We get both of those things.
What do we want from a giant megaplex movie that could have been a B-grade movie? Nutso scenes.
We get that too, including shots of the Meg trying to eat a just out of reach (and tiny) Jason Statham and the Meg leaping out of the water trying to catch Statham. Oh, we also get Jason Statham fighting the Meg mano-a-sharko. Yes, Statham attacks the Meg up close with a harpoon.
That is what you can expect from this movie.
The fact that it showed on both IMAX and in 3D makes this possibly the most fun you will have at the movies this summer. Don’t expect the next Jaws. Expect the next Lake Placid, but with a 65-foot prehistoric shark in a no-holds-barred match with Jason Statham.
In that area, it is a rousing success.