The Ending of 'The Meg' Is the Best Part of This Overstuffed Shark Thriller

the meg movie
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros.

This post contains spoilers for The Meg, and discusses the ending of the movie in detail.

Scale is The Meg's greatest asset and, ultimately, its downfall. The Jason Statham-starringsea creature thriller, which splashes into theaters this weekend after a decade-long development process and a summer of hype, wants to be the biggest, loudest, and priciest shark movie ever made. In shark movie terms, it makes Deep Blue Sea look like Open Water. But in pursuit of great size, it makes a fatal mistake: It saves its best material for its ludicrous finale and bites off more than it can chew.

Still, what an ending! But until we get there, The Meg spends a frustrating amount of time setting up a plot that's as shallow as a kiddie pool. Statham plays Jonas Taylor, an expert diver recruited to rescue his ex-wife and a team of scientists trapped in their fancy underwater vehicle after a mysterious force causes them to lose contact with the home base. He gets the job done, but meets an old nemesis along the way: a 90 foot super-shark known as a "Megalodon" that was thought to be extinct. Now, it's time to rumble.

But director Jon Turteltaub, the filmmaker behind similarly proudly ridiculous National Treasure movies, stages most of the man and shark conflicts out in the water and away from land. There's one dynamite sequence, thankfully filmed in broad daylight to keep the action clear, that involves Statham attempting to poison the shark and getting yanked like a body-surfing Ken doll for his troubles. But none of this captures the queasy tension and sense of shared public terror that the best shark movies evoke.

the meg
Warner Bros.

In the movie's final stretch, the Meg gets hungry enough to seek out a Chinese beach packed with vacationing potential shark meals. Turteltaub and the film's three credited screenwriters provide the movie's finned villain with a buffet of dietary options: There's the group of guys flirting with some bikini-clad women on a floating barge, a cute kid wearing a floppy hat and licking a popsicle, and a teenager rolling around in a giant plastic bubble like Wayne Coyne at Bonnaroo. Later, Turteltaub even introduces a rich wedding party and a fluffy little dog that goes for an eventful swim. No cliché goes unexplored.

The carnage that follows is mostly bloodless -- this is a far cry from the R-rated splatter-fest of the recent Piranha films -- but the Meg does end up killing quite a few innocent bystanders and presumably causing some serious injuries. (Turteltaub says they had to cut some graphic deaths to maintain the kid-friendly PG-13 rating.) Besides, it's not gore that makes these scenes work. It's all in the combination of white-knuckle panic and absurd laughter Turteltaub is able to whip up by cutting back and forth between the shark and its human victims. We don't need severed limbs. 

From there, the stupidity crescendos, and Jonas and his team of fearless scientists lure the shark away from the beach with some whale calls. Jonas almost gets chewed up by the shark while piloting one those nifty underwater vessels, but he eventually uses the watercraft to pierce the shark's slimy skin right across the belly. Then, in a triumphant bit of naval warfare that would make Herman Melville proud, Jason Statham stabs the Meg in the eye with a metal rod. Take that, you prehistoric asshole. It's a GIF waiting to happen. 

the meg movie
Warner Bros.

Wounded and blinded in one eye, the shark bleeds out, its rapidly draining innards attracting a crowd of smaller sharks, who quickly feast upon the wounded bully. I suppose the image could be interpreted as a larger metaphor for the cyclical brutality of the natural world, or perhaps a sharp meta-commentary on how films like The Meg are gnawing at the rotting corpses of blockbusters from another era. But it's also just a satisfying conclusion to a story that sputters its way through a series of lackluster set pieces and bland character beats. Finally, Statham has found a worthy opponent.

The 1997 science-fiction novel that inspired The Meg has multiple sequels, and one might expect the movie to tease a confrontation between the giant shark and some other prehistoric beast. That doesn't happen. Instead, the dog is saved and Statham ends up with the beautiful oceanographer (Bingbing Li) and her cute daughter (Shuya Sophia Cai). (For a second, it looks like a smaller shark emerges from the Meg's mouth after it dies, suggesting maybe the Meg is being piloted by a tinier version of itself.) There's no post-credits scene and when the camera pans towards the bottom of the ocean in the last shot, we're only left with the word "fin" on screen. Har, har, har.

Honestly, that's probably for the best. The Meg is an unwieldy action adventure film, stuffed with unnecessary supporting characters and whale blubber, and, even in a genre that prides itself for being "mindless" fun, it's too dumb to take seriously and too serious to be played for laughs. Arriving weeks after the high-octane joy of Mission: Impossible - Fallout, a movie that makes better use of both helicopters and ex-wives, The Meg feels especially derivative and uninspired. We'll always have that shot of Statham stabbing the shark in the eye. Now let's allow this franchise sink to the bottom of the ocean and rest for another million years.

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Dan Jackson is a staff writer at Thrillist Entertainment. He's on Twitter @danielvjackson.