No, what The Meg does surprisingly well is walk the thin line between both. It’s actually a good, old-fashioned monster movie, with laughs and jolts and a few moments of genuine suspense right where it needs them. It’s earnest enough to a degree, but it’s also self-aware: the people in the movie live in a world where movies about monster sharks also exist. Best of all, it’s got Jason Statham to do a lot of the heavy-lifting, keeping the whole thing afloat whenever the titular monster is off-screen. Turteltaub knows his way around an action-adventure scenario well enough and keeps things moving briskly as the plot–a simple this-happened-and-then-this-happened-next construct–unspools. Statham stars as Jason Statham (this time perfunctorily called Jonas Taylor), an expert deep sea rescue diver, whose failure to save two friends during a mission sent him into self-imposed exile at the bottom of a bottle–especially since no one believes his claim that he glimpsed the giant prehistoric shark that was seemingly the cause of their deaths. Five years later, Statham, we mean Taylor, is called out of retirement by Dr. Zhang (Winston Chao) when three members of Zhang’s deep-sea exploration mission are trapped in their submersible–one of which is Taylor’s ex-wife. Taylor reluctantly heads back to work where he clashes with Zhang’s daughter Suyin (Li Bingbing) over the rescue operation. Two of the three trapped researchers are saved, but Taylor’s fears are borne out: there is a Megalodon, long thought dead, lurking in the depths, and it’s on the hunt and hungry as hell. The rest of the cast, including the appealing Li, the charismatic (and future Batwoman) Ruby Rose, wisecracking Page Kennedy, and sturdy Cliff Curtis, are all good enough with the sketched-in characters they have to play, but this show clearly belongs to Statham and the shark. And neither disappoints; Statham is his usual steely yet empathetic self, always ready with a quip in that unmistakable accent and just as eager to jump convincingly into the fray and instigate a punch-up with a giant fish. He may never have the depth of other stars, but he’s watchable as ever when in ordinary person mode and reliably convincing in the action sequences. The Megalodon is like a locomotive with teeth, a thrift-store cross between a kaiju and Jaws’ Bruce the shark that gets the job done. Read the Den of Geek SDCC 2018 Special Edition Magazine Here! The Meg is out in theaters on Friday, Aug. 10.
