The Meg (

2018

) ½

Sometimes, cultural cross-pollination gives us works of staggering brilliance and near-universal audience appeal. Just look at Godzilla (1954), where Japanese filmmakers drew on American monster movies like King Kong (1933) and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and spawned a film series that persists to this day. Such tantalizing returns would tempt even the most conservative bean-counter, but the problem is that it only really works when artists are making a work that genuinely excites them. When professionals are merely churning out a product, they are more interested in creating something that they can sell to as many people as possible across both cultures. The result invariable smooths over the rough edges of the cultural divide and creates a bland, adequate work that will offend few and excite none. Such is the case with today's film, a collaborative production between Hollywood and Chinese film studios that can offer neither the lavish production values of tinsel town nor the breakneck pacing of Chinese films. What we get with The Meg, is effectively a sci-fi (syfy?) channel original movie with a $150 million budget: Flat characters, functional effects, a cliched story, and a fundamentally flawed script.

Our story unfolds in Mana One, a massive underwater research station 200 miles away from Shanghai, built with generous donations from tech-billionaire Jack Morris and headed up by Dr. Minway Zhang. Zhang has a theory that the Mariana Trench is not actually the deepest point in the ocean, but instead, there is an undiscovered region of the sea beneath a cloud of hydrogen sulfide. That's the theory he's used to get hundreds of millions from Morris, and after years of planning and building special equipment, he's ready to test it. Things go along swimmingly at first, the submarine (crewed by Toshi, Lori, and The Wall, presumably not his real name) breaks through the cloud and discovers a hidden world full of exotic marine lifeforms. Without warning, the sub is attacked and disabled by a megalodon, a giant prehistoric Shark, long thought to be extinct. The vessel is left crippled on the bottom of the ocean floor, with only fourteen hours or so before its oxygen is exhausted and the crew suffocates.

Zhang's daughter Suyin wants to jump in the spare sub, rush down to the bottom and pull the crew up right away but Zhang is wary of doing so. For one thing, nobody on his team has any experience with deep-sea rescues at such extreme depth, for another thing towing the damaged sub is dangerous in-and-of-itself as the ballast tanks could rupture and take both the original sub and the rescuer out in the detonation. The audience won't fault Zhang for not wanting to expose his only daughter to such a risk, especially not when she has a young daughter of her own to look after. So, Zhang goes looking for the one man who has ever successfully pulled off a rescue at a depth of more than 10,000 feet: Jonas Taylor. Taylor is available for hire, but only because after losing his two crew-mates in his last rescue dive, he's become an embittered drunk operating a fishing boat in Thailand. He comes around only when he learns that his ex-wife, Lori, is one of the ones trapped on the downed submarine (possible as a way of delivering one of history's greatest “I-told-you-so's”). The rescue is complicated by the fact that the giant shark is still patrolling the waters and attacking anything that comes close. Jonas manages to rescue the crew, but only has enough time to make his getaway thanks to the heroic sacrifice of Toshi, who stays behind in the crippled sub as a distraction.

So, it looks like the day is saved, at least until the team back on Mana One realizes that somehow, the giant shark has followed them through the hydrogen sulfide cloud. Now they have to deal with a 25-foot shark heading right for Sanya Bay, one of the busiest beaches on the planet. At least, unlike Chief Brody, they have a big enough boat to handle the job.

I suspect that Li Bingbing, the woman playing Suyin, is a far better actress when she performs in her native Chinese. This is not to say her English is poor, on the contrary, her pronunciation is flawless and she has only a slight accent. But it seems like she's focused completely on her diction rather than conveying any emotion through her lines, and the result can be downright robotic in some scenes. She'll probably improve with more practice (and a better director/script to work with) but for the moment she's just not up to snuff. Li gets little help from her leading male, as Jason Statham, the actor playing Jonas Taylor, is not really suited to dramatic or romantic scenes. He is first and foremost an action star, which is unsurprising given the fact that he looks like a Space Marine (though his low-class accent makes me think he'd be more at home in one of the traitor legions; is anyone planning an adaptation of Aaron Dembski-Bowden's Night Lords trilogy? Because I think we've found our Xarl), and in those scenes, he excels. Just don't ask any more of him than to look cool or tough and you'll be fine.

One scene featuring the two of them, is at least worth a closer look, if only for what it says about what is and is not socially acceptable to dramatize on screen. Suyin barges into Jonas' room to offer an apology, not realizing that he's just stepped out of the shower and is only wearing a towel. It's a gender-inverted version of the same scene from Fiend without a Face (1958). Here, as in the earlier film, the main purpose is cheesecake, though it's a bit dishonest: a PG-13 movie in 2018 can get away with a lot more than a 60-year-old British sci-fi movie. The gender inversion of the scene hints at how uncomfortable society has become with male heterosexuality in the intervening decades. We could never show a scene where a hero accidentally (or otherwise) barged in on the leading lady and expect him to remain heroic in the eyes of the audience for long. Suyin even steals a couple of glances over her shoulder as she's leaving the room, presumably at the now fully nude Jonas. Such behavior on the part of a male character would label him as a creep, rapist, or downright monster, while for a woman it comes across as a cute character moment.

Throughout the film's run-time The Meg flirts with the idea of introducing a secondary intellectual conflict in addition to the central man vs. shark narrative, only to immediately discard them. Take for instance the scene immediately after Jonas returns from his rescue mission with the sub's crew in tow, Jack Morris, being the closest thing the film has to an evil capitalist, pressures the scientists into researching and profiting upon The Meg's existence as soon as possible (how, pray tell, do you turn a giant shark into a profitable venture? Does he want to display it on Broadway and sell tickets?). This is not a novel plot development by any means, sci-fi movies have been playing this card at least since Alien (1979), but at this point, I wasn't expecting much. However, as soon as it's discovered that The Meg has escaped to upper waters, all talk of exploiting the discovery is immediately dropped. More galling, this happens again later on in the film when Suyin protests against killing the shark because it is such a huge scientific discovery only to immediately drop all reservations to hop in a shark cage and inject the creature with poison. Again, a solid, if incredibly cliched theme (here one that has been serving monster movies since Godzilla (1954)), is brought up and then dropped with zero development. The worst though is the impromptu lecture on the evils of shark-fin fishing, that comes from nowhere and leads to nothing. A film like this isn't going to change anyone's mind on the practice (personally, I find it abhorrent) and it seems downright arrogant for it to try. It would have been better if The Meg hadn't bothered with these sentiments if it was gonna short-change them to such a ludicrous degree. As it stands the whole thing just seems half-assed; like the screenwriters are checking off boxes rather than telling a story they genuinely care about.

The Meg works best when it's being light-hearted. Like all shark movie's nowadays there's the obligatory Jaws (1975) reference, coming here in the form of a mother (wearing the same style of swimsuit as Mrs. Kitner in the original film) reluctantly allows her son to go swimming. All the same beats of the familiar scene are hit, only exaggerated, and sped up to match the style of a contemporary Chinese movie. It reminds me of nothing so much as those bizarre, unofficial Hong Kong remakes of classic Hollywood films like Island of Fire (1990) (which is a shameless and bizarrely faithful copy of Cool Hand Luke (1967) of all things). It hints at what this film could have been, were it not saddled with such a massive budget and the expectations of Western studios: something downright fun. Too bad, an absurd, over-the-top Chinese re-imagining of Jaws (1975) would be one hell of a ride.