The Meg

Take the lesser entries in the Jaws franchise, toss in a bit of Sharknado, and you’ve got The Meg, a deep-sea creature feature that feels, um, watered down.

You hardly expect an intellectual masterpiece with this sort of cheese. Yet it needs the self-awareness to commit to being a comedy, an action thriller, or a horror movie. Instead, the film is only mildly funny, only slightly exciting, and only sporadically scary.

As the film opens, an explorer (Jessica McNamee) and her submarine crew become stranded after being attacked by what they believe is a giant shark. So the group of scientists overseeing the deep-sea mission call upon Jonas (Jason Statham), a diver who also happens to be her ex-husband.

Jonas was involved in a prior confrontation with the same creature five years earlier that ended in tragedy. Turns out it’s 70 feet long and known as a Megalodon — or Meg for short — a prehistoric predator believed to have been extinct for thousands of years.

Eventually, the Meg climbs toward the surface of the ocean, nearing a facility occupied by a marine biologist (Li Bingbing) and a greedy financer (Rainn Wilson), among others. Once they put their personal differences aside, the group must come together to exterminate the intruder, and its elongated dorsal fin, before it causes public paranoia and mass destruction.

The Meg needs to be leaner and meaner and get to the bloody chomping a lot sooner than it does. Instead, it seems softened for mainstream consumption, and transparently targeting the lucrative Asian box office with its cast and setting. Apparently the Chinese list of tariffed goods doesn’t include Hollywood schlock.

Meanwhile, the screenplay takes itself too seriously, includes some of the dumbest scientists in recent memory, and showcases such dialogue as: “That living fossil ate my friend!” No wonder the title character is so angry.

As directed by Jon Turteltaub (National Treasure), the film is technically proficient, with some impressive special effects and stylish underwater cinematography. Statham provides his usual charismatic growling beneath his trademark facial stubble.

Yet the first hour is considerably more tedious than thrilling. By the time the movie cranks up some decent man-versus-beast action, it’s already, ahem, jumped the shark.

Rated PG-13, 113 minutes.