The Meg

I will pretty much go to watch anything with Jason Statham in it, because the Stath is somehow awesome despite ticking all the boxes to make him a terrible actor. He pretty much has one expression and one tone of voice, and he tends to show up in action movies with no redeeming qualities other than the Stath his own bad self. IN some ways he’s like a grumpier Dwayne Johnson, carrying along movies which would be absolutely irredeemable without him. 

And on paper, you’re thinking; the Stath fights a giant shark. What can go wrong? Well, let’s establish some baselines here. The Meg is not a good movie, but it’s a less annoying movie than Skyscraper, to pick an example of a movie built around the Rock which just didn’t work. The Meg had an extra 5 million in the budget over Skyscraper, but they share a certain reverence for Chinese people and a largely Chinese setting. Skyscraper has a more consistent look; The Meg has kind of OK underwater CGI, and kind of craptastic looking live action surface work, which means that every time you get out of the water you feel like you’re going back in time to the days when action movies were made with whatever actual props were handy and we didn’t know enough to wonder why everything looked like it had been salvaged by drunk people. 

Anyhow, the Stath has to stop a huge shark from eating all the everythings. This does not go incredibly well. Several speaking parts and quite a few beachgoers get gobbled up before the Meg gets its chips, though dog lovers everywhere will be delighted to see that the dog in peril survives to the closing credits. So does Ruby Rain. I can’t figure out Ruby Rain; any time I’ve seen her in anything, I’ve wanted to see more of her, but I can’t pin down why. She just has a bit of presence and movies seem to give her less to do than she might be up to. Anyhow, she gets about ten lines and nearly eaten two or three times, and I hope she gets more work soon.

People who don’t make it; I was really annoyed that neither Masi Oka nor Olafur Olafsson made it. They were playing the only characters with more than one dimension, and they’re immensely likeable actors. So I was fed up when the both got chomped. Particularly Olafsson. By the time he gets chummed up he’s had a chance to build up a real presence, and as the pieces got moved into place for his demise I was dreading it. About half the cast gets killed, but this was the only death which made me anxious. And weirdly, he’d shown up in last week’s movie; he had a four minute cameo as a tourist in a hostel who deus ex machinas one of the bad guys.

Anyhow, it’s not a great movie, but it’s not a bad bad movie. And having played it pretty straight the whole way through, it closed out on a gag; as the credits rolled, the first word to come up was “Fin”.