Who isn’t a sucker for shark movies? Ever since a young director named Steven Spielberg adapted Peter Benchley’s novel Jaws in 1975—practically inventing the “summer blockbuster”—the collective American conscious has been chasing that deep-sea dragon for more than 40 years, from the campy shark fetishism of Deep Blue Sea and Discovery’s Shark Week, to the terror-from-the-deep copycats of Piranha and Lake Placid, and lastly, to the low-budget absurdity of the Sharknado series and myriad other made-for-TV throwaways. Like Ghost Shark.
Though not as dumb as the last examples, The Meg isn’t as fun as the first two, either. This might be because director Jon Turteltaub has a fondness for directing discount versions of better films. Perhaps best known for National Treasure, a blatant cross-pollination of the mega-hit novel The Da Vinci Code and Indiana Jones (Spielberg, again), this reviewer will always have a soft spot for his version of Home Alone, in which he replaces one Kevin McAllister with 3 Ninjas. That The Meg itself is adapted from a 1997 novel that has clearly, after all these years, coasted on the waves of Jaws makes it the perfect project for this director.
Turteltaub’s experience only excels at creating a competently boring tale that follows all the beats of a Jaws sequel without changing much beyond the shark’s size. If you go in the water, and the shark’s in the water, it’s not going to make much of a difference whether the shark is 20 feet or 70. The filmmakers seem to realize as much and are either unwilling or unable to subvert expectations, instead resorting to and relying on jump scares like they’re going out of style. Man, that giant shark sure is sneaky.
But the underlying reason for The Meg’s mediocrity lies in the strategy behind its intended audience. The Meg is part of a new trend of international movies, made as not much for the American market as for the Chinese. As of this writing, it has made more money overseas than in the US. Nothing is inherently wrong with this trend, but until studios realize that the common ground between cultures of “big shark, blow sh*t up” actually needs to be fun and entertaining for both cultures, then everyone will continue to get this watered-down chum. But who needs fun when they already know we’re all suckers for shark movies?
