A truly bizarre monster movie starring one of the last working movie stars chomps Elle Woods and Chris Pratt on streaming
Jason Statham belongs to a class of near-extinct performers that, in many ways, create a clear distinction between the word “actor” and “performer.” Like the Schwarzeneggers and Stallones of decades past, it’s never the acting you anticipate from Statham, but his macho persona dealing with a new set of problems.
In The Meg, that problem is a megalodon — a shark that happens to be bigger than, ostensibly, most of our futures. It first dropped into cinemas in August 2018, and its shiny $529.2 million box office haul was more than enough for Warner Bros. to greenlight Meg 2: The Trench five years later. More importantly, however, it proved that audiences were as hungry as ever for good old-fashioned creature features, as the denizens of Prime Video have continued to prove today.
Per FlixPatrol, The Meg is currently swimming in seventh place on the Prime Video film charts in the United States at the time of writing. Failing to jump this particular shark is a ninth-place Jurassic World — a less desirable monster movie considering its more prestigious roots — and a 10th-place Legally Blonde, also a monster movie by way of those beastly tuition prices for higher education.
The Meg stars Statham as Jonas Taylor, a rescue diver haunted by memories of the people he failed to save on past expeditions. He’s recruited by a group of scientists to rescue a research/exploration crew — who his ex-wife happens to be a part of — when they become trapped in a trench containing yet-undiscovered sea life, and let’s just say Jonas and the rescuees aren’t the only things that emerge from the trench.
A co-production between the United States and China, The Meg is a very strange movie. It’s neither formulaic nor particularly coherent. Its personality is distinct, yet it remains inconsequential. Refreshingly unpretentious, yet creatively lazy. Not quite nothing, but not really anything, either.
Indeed, the plot beats all bleed into one another as Statham and the gang peddle along in their impromptu war against Mother Nature’s secret fighter — the inciting incident, climax, and everything in between instead read as one, long, connected incident. The scientist Zhang muses philosophically on humanity’s destructive relationship with nature, and then Rainn Wilson (as billionaire Morris) scoffs and rolls his eyes because this movie has no interest in anything truly intelligent. That’s not a knock at The Meg — it doesn’t meet that intelligence with cynical/obnoxious stupidity, but rather politely turns it away at the door before doing another cinematic keg stand in the form of a shark-stabbing Jason Statham.
One genuinely interesting aspect about this particular Statham action hero is the sweetness with which he interacts with children (the child, being the eight-year-old Meiying, played by Sophia Cai). It’s not much, but in place of the straight-yet-satirical genius that make up the actor’s best escapades (The Beekeeper being the prime example there), it makes for a surprisingly fresh revelation on Statham’s rangeless reputation.
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