In development in some form or another for at least a dozen years now, The Meg has had a long journey in bringing audiences a ridiculously huge fish that tries to eat Jason Statham. But like the ludicrously large prehistoric shark, man is patient, and persistent. Once the scent of another modestly successful Statham vehicle was in the water, there was no stopping until biting a $150 million chunk out of some idiot producer’s pocket. And this summer, at last the waters will be bloodied with scarcely acted lines like, “My god… it’s Megalodon.”
The latest consistently arbitrary addition to director Jon Turteltaub’s résumé, the film sees Statham, Li Bingbing, Rainn Wilson, Ruby Rose, Winston Chao, and Cliff Curtis on some sort of undersea vessel that encounters a stupidly gargantuan shark. After spending millennia hidden deep below the ocean, the cartilaginous bastard’s discovery seemingly drives it to start attacking people—even taking a cue from Jaws to ravage some tourist-filled beachside shallows, bottoming-out be damned. (Winds are fortunately not strong enough to pull the Megalodon into a big-ass Sharknado.)
Will Jason Statham get eaten, then punch his way out of the shark from the inside and, pandering to the film’s obviously intended Chinese market, proclaim that they must eat the fin to gain its magical healing powers? Probably. We won’t know for sure until The Meg hits theaters August 10.
