The Meg review: Jason Statham finds his comfort zone battling a giant shark

Some cheering news as the 2018 summer blockbuster season rounds into its home straight: the mega shark is not a giant crock.

In fact, The Meg delivers exactly what its advertising campaign promises, with no unexpected surprises, pleasant or otherwise. See! Jason Statham locked in combat with a 75-foot prehistoric man-eater for two hours, or thereabouts. Thrill! At our bullet-headed hero repeatedly snatching victory, or at least survival, from the literal jaws of defeat. Gasp! At a genuinely enticing action-movie premise, executed with charm and reasonably persuasive CGI. Swoon! At the realisation that within a few years, every second hundred-million-dollar film might look like this, thanks to the new influx of Chinese money into Hollywood (The Meg was produced by Flagship Entertainment, a joint venture between Warner Bros and China Media Capital).

Pay attention during the submarine chases and hair’s-breadth escapes and you can see an aesthetic of sorts taking root. The Meg unspools in a spotless, lightly glazed, style-free style of cine-Esperanto, with its chaste, chirpy multi-national cast and little in the way of culturally specific quirks.

None of this suggests a second golden age of blockbusting is approaching, exactly; The Meg’s (arguably ironic) determination not to rock the boat for any sector of its global audience makes Renny Harlin’s Deep Blue Sea, the previous post-Jaws benchmark for bland man-v-shark adventures, look like something Francis Ford Coppola might have bellowed into existence in an auteurist frenzy in the 1970s.

But Jon Turteltaub’s film is significantly better than recent flavour-free US-China co-productions like Pacific Rim Uprising, Skyscraper and The Great Wall – which means that while these ventures’ capacity to produce great pop art remains unproven, at least we now know they can work.

The plot, which is astonishingly based on a novel, has Statham as the Captain Ahab-like Jonas Taylor, an  former naval officer who is enlisted by Jack Morris (Rainn Wilson), an Elon Musk-type billionaire nincompoop, to save the crew of his research submarine, which has become stranded in a just-discovered undersea trench. Jonas quickly surmises what is amiss: the craft has been downed by a Carcharocles megalodon, a species of giant shark thought to have been extinct for two million years. He knows because five years ago, a similar thing happened to his submarine on a similar expedition, leaving most of his men dead – which makes this less of a mission than a rematch. Teaming up with oceanographer Suyin (Bingbing Li), Jonas straps into an appealingly Thunderbirds-esque mini-sub and drop into the breach.

From here on in, The Meg divides cleanly into three parts: the rescue, the ensuing battle with the beast in the open sea, and finally a beach resort finale featuring the subaquatic hungry-cam pioneered by Spielberg in Jaws, in which beachgoers’ legs are shown dangling appetisingly from rubber rings, like chipolatas crying out to be chomped. Not that the angle makes much sense for the Meg, whose mouth is wide enough to sweep up humans whole like plankton, but you have to pay tribute to the greats.

As you might expect, Statham is at his best when flying, swimming or just growling solo – as a former diver and member of Britain’s national swimming squad, the role bullseyes his comfort zone in every respect. His cutesy chemistry with Li also passes muster, just about. The primary heat source in the crew, however, is Orange is the New Black’s Ruby Rose, whose punky engineer Jaxx is the most engaging supporting presence here by miles, and who looks like a manga character come to life. (The low point is Page Kennedy’s DJ, a rudimentary black-best-friend stereotype whose only function is dishing out wacky asides.)

A 12A certificate signals a lack of graphic devourings up front, although the climactic beach set-piece is low on imagination too, and lacks the panicky excitement of, say, the lagoon feeding frenzy in Piranha 3D. In fact, The Meg’s most thrilling moment doesn’t even involve the Meg: it’s the moment the submarines discover the creature’s prehistoric domain, which lies beneath a soupy layer of ice-cold fluid previously thought to be the ocean floor itself.

In that sense, at least, there are no depths to which The Meg won’t sink. But as trashy cinema goes, it all feels a little too well behaved.