Shut up Meg.

There is no such thing as a perfect film. There are great films, legendary films even, that get things so right that it would be foolhardy to attempt to compete with them. It's why so many movies get put back during blockbuster season; even with the most self-aggrandising studio executives and bravado for days, sometimes you just have to accept you aren't going to make as much money as Marvel/Disney this Summer with their one-two punch of Superheroes and Star Wars. Even if you hate the movies, denying that they making literal tons of money is the kind of bloody minded ignorance that you expect from politicians. On the other side of that freshly minted coin are the movies so great you wonder why anyone would even attempt to go near the genre, let alone remake them.

Spielberg (more or less) perfected the shark movie in 1975 when he poured a bunch of foam latex over a ridiculously oversized shark puppet and set to scaring the bejeezus out of anyone who lived within 4 miles of a beach. If you look at all the facets of a decent horror movie, Jaws effectively pioneered the lot. Jump scares, creeping terror, a decent bit of gore (this was the seventies after all) and if that reveal doesn't get you every time then you're obviously part shark yourself, forged in the primordial soup and unchanged for millennia as an indomitable apex predator. Unless you wind up in a jungle or something and then you're basically keeping some remote tribe somewhere in home-made Fillet o' Fish for a good number of months. I can't imagine the cajones on the guy who watches Jaws and automatically thinks they can do better. There were of course the Jaws sequels; Jaws 2 is passable, Jaws 3-D was horrendous drivel and Jaws 4 asked us to believe the possibility that sharks had the potential to hold inter-generational grudges. I have a soft spot for Deep Blue Sea, partially because of the beautifully interrupted rousing speech half way through and partially because it was one of about 4 DVDs I had with me while I was recovering from my hernia operation so I watched it about a million times over the space of a fortnight, due to that being easier than getting up to switch the DVD over. I've never watched any of the Sharknado series and I'm not prepared to entertain a discussion on it.

I do like sharks though, giant, toothy misunderstood murder-fish that they are, so I was obviously going to chuck folding money in the direction of The Meg (I even bought the novel it's based on, although I still haven't got round to reading it). It's a classic action movie premise for a sequel or remake: if in doubt, just go bigger. The plot takes roughly 30 seconds to outline; giant prehistoric shark is released from its watery confines because mankind can't keep from prodding bits of the planet with sticks and it goes about eating stuff. Fortunately we have a team of scientific types intent on stopping it from devouring everyone in Thailand, including Jason Statham as the reluctant deep sea rescue expert who hasn't dived since he left his mates to die in a submarine, his ex-wife who takes a screwdriver to the guts pretty early on and then disappears from the story for huge rafts of time convalescing, and Ruby Rose as a tech guru with the greasiest hair committed to celluloid since Megan Fox smeared herself all over the Transformers franchise (until she called Michael Bay 'Hitler' and vanished for years before re-appearing in TMNT) There's a love interest of course, which is a bit weird and awkward in places, and a billionaire mogul that's part Branson, part Musk and every bit of the douchebag that terrible genetic paring might suggest, fully rounding out the list of stereotypes you'd expect to find huddled together on a research station. At least the writers have the good grace to call out their own BS when the sassy black guy can't swim.

Let's be perfectly honest: The Meg is thoroughly ridiculous, but it has no pretences to the contrary. Is the science realistic? Not especially. It seems reasonable though, within the world they've creating. Is it likely marine geologists have mistaken a giant super cooled cloud of gasses for the ocean floor for years? Probably not. Is there a chance Megalodons are frolicking around in the deep and nasty parts of the sea? Probably not, but you never know. This isn't a Cousteau documentary though, so who cares? You want to see a bunch of people get swallowed whole by a big old ancient fish, not an actual thesis on the biological possibilities of undiscovered marine life, right? Exactly. This is the very essence of a big, dumb, fun movie. There are enough underwater chases, idiots jumping into shark cages, 'it's behind you!' moments and unnecessary heroic sacrifices to keep even the most die-hard cynic entertained for 2 hours. This is a Statham movie, so there is an obligatory shirtless scene for those of you into that sort of thing (no judgement here, just wipe the seat down after yourselves, you filthy monkeys) and he does spend the entire movie sounding like he's potentially going to stab someone at any given moment, but it is what it is. And what it is, is effectively Jaws 5: The Embiggening.

There's no escaping the fact that this is effectively a mix of much less serious, much less Seventies Jaws and a more polished, less serious Deep Blue Sea. There are a bunch of recognisable tropes and beats in here which are either subtle nods or unavoidable devices, but when essentially you're dealing with a boat full of snacks for a massive eating machine it all boils down to finding new, innovative and increasingly perilous ways to get land-based mammals to go for a swim. They don't outwardly say they'll need a bigger boat, but effectively that was the elevator pitch and I'm surprised it never made it onto the promotional material. Even having had one relatively big plot twist spoiled for me (I'll do you the favour of not repeating that faux pas, even though I think you'd probably have seen it coming a mile off anyway, it's not exactly subtle) I had great fun with this. It's probably nothing like the book, but there are at least four more of those, so box office receipts pending, I'm looking forward to the sequel.