The Meg

Jon Turteltaub wrote and directed his first feature film in 1989 at the age of 25. The movie was called Think Big, and it starred musclebound twins David and Peter Paul (aka the Barbarian Brothers) as toxic waste-toting truck drivers sheltering a runaway teenage genius. Turteltaub followed it a few years later with 3 Ninjas, a family-oriented film about three white kids who are Japanese ninjas, and over the next quarter century, he produced a steady output of exactly that kind of lowbrow, brain cell-killing crud. Three Nicolas Cage collaborations later, we get Turteltaub’s latest forgettable trifle: The Meg, a Crackle-worthy monster shark movie starring the always monotone Jason Statham. Essentially a PG-13 version of Alexandre Aja’s Piranha 3D with fewer jokes and even less of a point, The Meg is a faceless, lifeless, workmanlike, unimaginative, lowest common denominator-courting, movie-like substance. In other words, it’s infused with that Turteltaub magic.