Legend has it that when Lee Marvin was sounded out about the role of Quint in Jaws, he replied: "I eat fish, fish don't eat me." Robert Shaw had no such nautical notions and 43 years later some of us are still searching out blackboards in his honour.
Like Shaw, Jason Statham is another man who knew better than to look a gift shark in the mouth with The Meg - a film that goes all out to challenge for the title of The Second Best Shark Movie Ever Made. The cellist isn't on double pay here, but all the $150m budget has been well spent elsewhere.
Statham's Jonas Taylor is an underwater expert now exploring the bottom of a bottle. A rescue mission went disastrously wrong and the powers-that-be refused to believe that there was - yes! - "something down there" apart from a stricken sub.
When another crew becomes live bait six miles below, Taylor sobers and suits up and gets ready to show his own teeth. There'll be plenty more flashing of pearly whites in the cinema.
Director Jon Turteltaub (Cool Runnings, the National Treasure movies) has done the popcorn industry a serious service with this carnivorous charmer - bizarrely a pass-the-parcel project in Hollywood for the guts of two decades.
Mixing chow downs and crisis comedy (more of the former, mind), The Meg is a good pelvic floor workout but never takes life-or-death situations too seriously for too long. It also puts its 'we're going to need a bigger shark' mantra up to Mission: Impossible - Fallout to challenge for most entertaining film of the summer. The Yorkshire Terrier cameo will swing it for many.
With the sweat-on-stubble gravitas that has become his trademark, Statham warns us that "Man vs Meg isn't a fight - it's a slaughter." Sure enough, co-stars are rapidly dispatched as the special effects team pile one maritime mauling atop another as the black polo neck-wearing warrior and titular terror go all out for high seas mastery. There's scenery chewing aplenty - on both sides.
Statham is 51; his co-star is getting up on 2.6 million and whatever age you are, in their company you'll be 10 again in no time. Reeling in the years indeed.
