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In 'The Meg', director Jon Turteltaub is unsure if he wants to have some fun and jump the Sharknado, or make a seriously gory fish fest.Courtesy of Warner Bros. Picture

  • The Meg
  • Written by Dean Georgaris, Jon Hoeber
  • Directed by Jon Turteltaub
  • Starring Jason Statham, Bingbing Li, Rainn Wilson
  • Classification 14A/113 minutes

Rating:

1.5 out of 4 stars

The makers of The Meg may have gone to school on Spielberg, but the big-budget deep-sea thriller is nothing but bloodless summer filler. Unsure if he wants to have some fun and jump the Sharknado or make a seriously gory fish fest, director Jon Turteltaub has surfaced with nets empty.

The main takeaway from this Jaws knockoff is that sharks, after all these years, still resist proper flossing regimens. Jason Statham stars as a rescue diver on the skids who has redemption thrust upon him when he is tasked to deal with a colossal shark that’s not so extinct after all.

Surrounded by B-actors, a struggling Statham (who, at 51, can still fill out a bath towel) rises to the occasion like so many pitiful air bubbles. The film could stand for some young Bruce Willis – call it Dive Hard, if you must.

Rainn Wilson isn’t given many good lines, but when he arrives to his mega-expensive research centre he cracks a Star Trek joke, which is our clue that The Meg is salt-water sci-fi. At one point a whale is confused for a shark. “It’s got no teeth,” a dude says. And that basically sums up the whole dumb thing.

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