When your movie is best remembered for its tagline “just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water” – you know it’s in trouble. And although this is the best of the sequels, that’s a low bar. Possibly, studio Universal couldn’t have care less, given its performance at the box office, setting the weekend record and topping the annual box office league, with more receipts due when it was paired with the original in a reissue double bill.
The main problem isn’t that wunderkind Steven Spielberg avoided the project and deprived the movie of visual class. Or that original director John Hancock (Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, 1971) was axed in favor of Jeannot Swarc (Bug, 1975). But that the screenwriters took their eye off a very interesting ball and placed the emphasis on the kind of really annoying screaming teenagers you were begging for the shark to gobble up.
We already knew that Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) couldn’t swim but it turns out he’s next to useless in handling a boat and has never learned the most basic navigational skills. In some sense not surprising given his last voyage was unadulterated terror. But you might have thought he’d try better to acclimatize himself to the island’s ways and take a basic seamanship course.
Already, the movie sets the tone of him shifting towards the demented as, obsessed with the arrival of another great sea beast, he scares the hell out of beachgoers by blazing his six-shooter at a harmless tuna, this setting him firmly at odds with the community hierarchy who are involved in some money-making construction project.
We’ve leaned in pretty much to his emotions, the fear of a repetition of the previous incident, and the dissolution of his character as he falls apart under the pressure. So what better than to strand him in the middle of the ocean, barely able to master a boat, and completely lost and having to go mano a mano against a great white in a downscale version of The Old Man and the Sea.
Instead, having not bothered to flesh out the characters of any of the boating youngsters beyond that they were in the main cast for their physical attributes and for passing with flying colors the scream test, we are stuck with them for too long. Of course, you can make the argument that all the audience wants to see is a lot of chomping and a bunch of teenagers fits the bill as abundant prey, but that’s to deny the impact of just threat rather than gore that Spielberg achieved with his masterpiece.
It’s obvious why composer John Williams steered clear of his iconic Jaws theme because there just wasn’t sufficient threat to pin it on. Of course, we don’t need a know-it-all shark expert because the audience already received as much education on that score as was required via the previous iteration. But we sure do miss an old seadog like Quint.
Half the way in, I thought – not having seen it since it came out and my memory of that restricted to the tag line – this has all the makings of a very decent sequel with the emphasis at that point on Brody’s disintegrating character. Heap it on, I was almost yelling at the screen, put him through more angst and terror, get him out there alone with the shark and figure out a way to survive.
Quite how Brody would have killed off the beast without a deux ex machina in the shape of a seabed electricity cable that somehow the shark with a whole lunch and dinner of helpless teenagers sitting in his immediate line of sight instead heads for said cable because the Chief is able to attract him by beating out a tune on the cable is anybody’s guess. If your screenwriters had exhausted every other notion of how to kill the shark, then for sure, a cable comes in handy, but again that’s a very low bar.
Roy Scheider (Jaws, 1975) gets to be even more swivel-eyed and anxious than before but nobody else makes a mark and even Murray Hamilton, reprising his role as the sleazy mayor, isn’t on screen long enough. I would have stuck him out in the boat with the Chief and let him go through some rite of passage so that he turns into a good guy.
Clearly, Universal was depending on lightning striking twice with neophyte director Jeannot Swarc but he only shows what he lacks compared to Spielberg stuck with a lame screenplay by Carl Gottlieb (Jaws) and Howard Sackler (Gray Lady Down, 1978) which is connected in name only to the Peter Benchley bestseller.
Good up to a point then abruptly capsizes.
