The Meg: 7 Reasons It's The Best Dumb Movie Of 2018
6. Rainn Wilson Is In A Different Movie Than Everybody Else
The Meg is a movie of two halves. On one hand, it tries to be a character-driven drama, with plenty of talky scenes (some of which feel misplaced and go on for way too long) punctuating the watery action, and a forced romantic subplot attempting to bring heart to proceedings.
On the other, it tries to be a big dumb popcorn movie, with plenty of exciting sequences featuring the gigantic bloodthirsty shark.
It doesn't pull off either of these two tones perfectly, and instead ends up with a decent middle-ground between the two. Nowhere is this split down the middle of the movie more evident than when you look at the cast, and more specifically, the way one actor plays his character versus how everybody else plays theirs.
That one actor is Rainn Wilson, who most people will know as Dwight Schrute from the The Office. In The Meg, Wilson is the comedic relief, supplying the majority of the laughs as well as delivering plenty of meta and refreshingly self-aware one-liners. He embraces the cheese, and he knows he's in a stupid 90-foot-shark movie.
The rest of the cast, however, does not. Surprisingly, even Statham plays it relatively straight, when a pinch of that ridiculous high-octane energy he brings to the Crank films would definitely not have gone amiss.
The Meg wants to have its cake and eat it too, but it would have been better off with a consistent approach - the one Wilson brings - to its premise.