10 Big 2018 Movies You Should Be Worried About
8. Meg
Reason To Be Worried: If it takes itself too seriously, it'll completely misfire.
2018's Meg, starring Jason Statham, is a movie about a 70-foot shark attacking a group of people who are trapped in a sunken submersible.
There's absolutely no way that a movie with that type of concept and this particular leading man can even remotely attempt to take itself too seriously, or approach the central conflict with anything less than its tongue firmly in its cheek.
Why? For starters... Jason Statham. The man's almost become a parody of himself in recent years - do we really want to see him with a straight face and a tear in his eye as he takes in all the destruction caused by the titular beast?
Hell no - we want to see him punch the shark in the face, grab its fin and ride it like a horse, and eventually blow it up, spouting the one-liner "That shark was in too deep" while walking away from the explosion in slow motion.
Secondly, take another movie with a similarly goofy concept - Sharknado. The franchise is terrible, but the reason it's so successful is because it knows how terrible it is. Do we want to see a news report of a Sharknado attack, as the camera pans over the grief-stricken faces of civilians and the music fades to silence?
Nope. All we want to see is a huge shark-tornado shredding people up, and that's also all we want from Meg - minus the tornado.
Unfortunately, director Jon Turteltaub has built a career on taking ludicrous, outlandish material and trying to ground it, with less-than impressive results - see both National Treasure movies and 2010's The Sorcerer's Apprentice.
Granted, those concepts aren't quite as silly as a 70-foot shark, but trying to tone them down was a bad move, in all three cases. For the director to do the same with Meg would be an error as big as the beast itself.