When Jaws kicked off the summer-movie culture as we know it in 1975, it also hastened the proliferation of sequels to those big summer blockbusters. Of course, sequels had been a Hollywood staple for decades by this point, often treated as low-budget cash-in afterthoughts, and the Jaws series didn’t exactly set a new high water mark for quality despite becoming Universal’s most expensive film to date. Rather, Jaws 2 wound up situated at a halfway point between the negligible sequels past and the higher-profile, higher-expectations sequels that would come to dominate summer in the decades to come; it set an opening weekend record, but of course it’s no one’s favorite Jaws movie. Is this Spielberg-free sequel any good, though? Now that the whole series is on Peacock, it’s the perfect time to find out.
JAWS 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: The first Jaws was about a shark so large and fierce it must have been unique to this particular situation. What Jaws 2 pre-supposes is: Maybe it wasn’t? And so we follow a new saga of a new large, fierce (and quickly, through its encounters with humans, scarred!) shark menacing the swimmers and teenagers of Amity Island. Though shark-hunter Quint is dead and biologist Hooper is long gone, Brody (Roy Scheider) remains police chief of Amity, once again tasked with convincing other authorities that a man-eating shark is indeed a viable threat to the population. This time, he’s stripped of his title for his trouble, and his troubles turn personal when his sons Mike (Mark Gruner) and Sean (Marc Gilpin) wind up on the water, right in the new shark’s bloody path.
What Will It Remind You Of?: Obviously the aim is to remind you of Jaws. But because so many of the shark’s victims are feckless teens this time around, Jaws 2 also plays a bit like a proto-slasher movie. (It came out just a few months before the original Halloween.) Specifically, it’s like a kid-friendlier version of Friday the 13th, which was released a few years later.
Performance Worth Watching: Well, it’s nice to see Roy Scheider again, even if it’s kind of a bummer that he was essentially strongarmed into appearing in Jaws 2 (for a hefty raise, of course) in lieu of fulfilling a three-picture deal with Universal.
Sex and Skin: Apart from typical bathing-suit stuff, this is one area where Jaws 2 isn’t really comparable to its slasher ancestors.
Memorable Dialogue: The most memorable line isn’t actually in the movie; it’s on the poster. “Just when you thought it was safe to back in the water…” became a tagline on part with “In space, no one can hear you scream” in terms of imitations and (especially) parodies. It’s also perfectly fitting that the advertising tag is far more famous than anything anyone says or does in the movie.
Our Take: The director of Jaws 2 is Jeannot Szwarc, who passed away earlier this year and whose American big-studio movie career can be characterized by a series of thankless tasks. Taking over for Steven Spielberg, maybe the best to ever do it, is an even more daunting task than his subsequent assignment of making a Superman-universe movie without Christopher Reeve. And honestly, if you’re going to see one Jeannot Szwarc-directed franchise picture, I’d recommend Supergirl over Jaws 2. That’s not to say that Jaws 2 is an absolute disaster. Szwarc sets the movie up with a decent sense of craft (there’s even an unobtrusive Spielberg-style oner early going), and the idea of Brody and his wife going on a rescue mission to save their kids from a nasty shark is a perfectly workable this-time-it’s-personal bit of sequel silliness. If the movie then delivered on its implicit promise of a bigger, gnarlier body count in the second half as the shark makes a several-course meal of a bunch of dumb teenagers, it would be a perfectly fine horror-movie sequel.
Instead, the movie waffles between the Hitchcockian build of Jaws and the more mercenary demands of a sequel, and winds up neither here nor there. It’s not a strong reinterpretation, reimagining, or even trashification of the original; it’s just Jaws again, with less memorable characters and less effective suspense sequences. Reading about other sequel ideas that were bandied about (like a prequel following Quint’s harrowing experience on the U.S.S. Indianapolis), it’s hard not to conclude that the producers went with a particularly cautious and middling one.
Our Call: It’s not the most egregious example of a cash-in sequel, and might even hold some novelty for anyone studying that particular summer-movie form. But if you’re looking for a solid good time with a shark movie, SKIP IT.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.
Read the full article here
