Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film, Jawsis a classic. Everything from its model shark, named Bruce, to its music to its famous lines (“We’re gonna need a bigger boat”) is iconic. It made a generation of horror fans a little more hesitant about taking to the ocean. However, as with many other franchises, the sequels it spawned failed to live up to the original.
The first sequel, Jaws 2picks up where the first one left off. Still on Amity Island, Roy Scheider’s police chief Martin Brody once again finds himself saving beachgoers from a deadly great white shark. It was entertaining but too derivative of the first one. Jaws 3-D, the second sequel, moved the action to SeaWorld in Florida. The excessive use of 3D shots and a mundane story led to the third film receiving harsher reviews than the previous films. However, it is in the fourth installment, Jaws: The Revengewhere the Jaws franchise reached its nadir, ultimately receiving a 2% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
A casting that could disappoint
At first glance, the casting of Jaws: The Revenge The film could very well be a success. Lorraine Gray reprises her role as Ellen Brody, the now-widowed matriarch of the family. Gray, who had retired from acting before returning to the franchise, unfortunately delivered a disappointing performance that earned her a Golden Raspberry nomination for Worst Actress. At least much of the film was shot in the Bahamas, so it could have been considered a working vacation.
Brody’s love interest, Hoagie, played by Michael Caine, is a pilot living in the Bahamas with whom the audience never really connects. Even two-time Oscar winner Caine failed to bring this flat character to life. In fact, he was also nominated for a Razzy for his performance. Clearly, his performance did not have a negative impact on Caine’s career, which lasted another four decades.
Another example of wasted talent Jaws: The Revenge is that of Mario Van PeeblesHe plays a local Bahamian, Jake, a marine biologist who works with Michael Brody. Van Peeble’s fake Bahamian accent makes it hard to take anything that comes out of Jake’s mouth seriously. That’s not the only waste of a talented Van Peeble. Mario’s legendary father, Melvin Van Peeble, director of such classics as Watermelon Man And Sweet DarlingThe song Baadassssss makes an appearance as the mayor of the island.
Shark roams ocean chasing family
The most glaring aspect of Jaws: The Revenge This is his plot. The film opens with Ellen Brody recovering from the death of her husband, Martin. This plotline was added after Roy Scheider, who played the protagonist in the first two films, was busy and unable to participate in the final act of the franchise. Unfortunately, This makes the death of one of its most important characters merely an afterthought.. Even just discussing a little more about what ultimately happened to Martin could have added to the story, but the character was largely abandoned.
Speaking of further thoughts, Jaws: The Revenge revisits the events of Jaws 2completely unaware of what happened Jaws 3DIn the third film, Ellen and Martin’s son Mike is an engineer at SeaWorld, but in the fourth film, he’s a marine biologist doing research in the Bahamas. This is a plot hole that could have been filled with a little reworking and a brief dialogue explaining Mike’s career change. Maybe it could even have been tied to his father’s unexplained death.
One of the most infamous slogans in cinema history, “This time it’s personal,” only scratches the surface of the disconnect with reality. Jaws: The Revenge gets. After Ellen Brody’s son is killed by a shark in Amity, she heads south to live with her only surviving family member. Although she is convinced that a shark is stalking her family, she decides to move to another island in the Bahamas, rather than settle in a landlocked place in central America.
Plagued by nightmares of great white sharks, Ellen develops an extrasensory ability that allows her to sense when her loved ones are threatened by a shark. At first, her son and family ignore her, explaining that great white sharks are never found in the Bahamas because the water is too warm. However, when a great white shark makes an unusual appearance in the waters, Ellen’s fears seem less unfounded.
Is this a great white conspiracy or just bad luck?
Indeed, as the title suggests, it seems that a shark is seeking revenge on the Brody clan. Is it a relative of the sharks that the Brody patriarch killed in Jaws And Jaws 2? Do they recognize the Brody family members by the smell of their blood (even when it is still in their bodies)? Was it just one shark that followed Ellen to the Bahamas from Amity Island, or do these great white sharks somehow communicate with each other? How do the sharks know where the Brody clan is? These are just a few of the unanswered questions Jaws: The Revenge Of course, shark attack movies require some suspension of disbelief, but there are limits to how much can be suspended.
Shark attack movies can often get away with minimal plots, as in the case of Open water. The plot of this film is simple: a couple of scuba divers are abandoned by their boat in shark-infested waters. Jaws: The RevengeIt would have been better to stick to something that simple.
Aside from the film’s other plot issues, the original ending of the film was changed based on its immediate reception. The idea was that American audiences disapproved of the ending, so it was reshot to add implausible survival via additional footage. When it comes to horror films, keeping the body count higher is usually a good idea, especially if a replay of a miraculous cure is needed.
The film falls somewhere between corny and sincere.
By today’s standards, the visual effects in the Jaws franchise aren’t particularly impressive. However, there are plenty of other pre-CGI films that have excellent visual effects – just look at the classic Ray Harryhausen films, for example. Jaws: The Revenge took inspiration from the original by cleverly hiding the shark for much of the film, instead tracking it via radar and showing the sharks in flashes in dreams or during attacks.
When the shark appears, it looks too much like the one from the first three films. There’s little surprise, and after the third film, which at least experimented with something new in its 3D shots, it feels like a step backwards in terms of technical prowess. Horror films depend on their special effects, and when franchises in the genre continue to release low-budget films with subpar effects, the films suffer.
The biggest flaw in the visual effects, however, has nothing to do with the sharks themselves. In a climactic scene, there is an unnecessary explosion despite there being no material with which such combustion could ignite. It doesn’t take a master pyrotechnician to know that it’s highly unlikely that a carbon-based life form would explode on impact without some sort of explosive.
This marks an unfortunate end for the franchise.
Aside from the first Jaws, expectations haven’t been particularly high for shark movies of any kind. Still, there have been some hits. Shark-nado The franchise leaned into its outrageous plot and embraced camp. Deep blue sea proposed genetically modified intelligent sharks in an isolated research facility, offering an explanation for its sharks’ aberrant behavior.
Jaws: The Revenge Both take themselves too seriously to be funny in the Ian Ziering way. Shark-nado and lacks the backstory of Thomas Jane’s film. The result is an average film that is neither “so bad it’s good” nor a gripping thrill ride like The Meg. This explains the 2% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Despite all its drawbacks, Jaws: The Revenge still deserves some attention as the latest film in the Jaws franchise. It brings back some familiar characters and explores some of the same tropes that audiences enjoyed in the first film. It has a place with big fans of the Jaws and those who like shark attack movies. The biggest disappointment is that it is associated with the Steven Spielberg classic. Jaws: The RevengeThe reception would probably have been more positive if it had been a standalone film, not associated with the popular franchise.