The problem with The Meg isn’t that it’s dumb, it’s that it isn’t dumb enough. This is a movie about Jason Statham fighting a giant prehistoric shark that eats submarines, which isn’t the sort of material that demands the My Dinner with Andre treatment (although I would watch that).
All a super-shark chomp-em-up like this needs is a series of increasingly improbable chompings and a cast willing to gnaw more scenery than their ravenous, doll-eyed counterparts. Deep Blue Sea got this formula pretty close to right 19 years ago, but The Meg (which, incidentally, languished in production hell for about the same length of time) hasn’t learned much from history.