#78 Jaws: The Revenge (Wes)

Jaws: The Revenge.

Jaws is my second favourite movie ever. It was so beautifully shot, acted and scored that I never tire of watching it. The story is simple, but absolutely gripping. The fact that you hardly see the shark until the very end, shows Speilberg’s masterful understanding of storytelling. In fact there’s not a single thing I can think of that’s wrong with that movie, which is possibly why the sequels have never quite been able to muster the sheer genius of the original. Jaws 2 was good, Jaws 3D was passable, so does Jaws: The Revenge finally jump the shark?

The Brody children from the first movie are both grown men now. Sean (Mitchell Anderson) is still living with his mother Ellen (Lorraine Gary) and working as a police deputy. A few days before Christmas, Sean is sent to clear a log that’s got tangled on a buoy. As he attempts this, a shark bursts from the water and eats him. Ellen, convinced that the shark purposely killed Sean, goes to stay with her other son Michael (Lance Guest), who is now a marine biologist living in the Bahamas with his own family. It isn’t long until the shark has travelled to the Bahamas and is now stalking Michael’s boat. The Brody family must once again pull together to destroy this vindictive shark, which seems to share a strange psychic connection with Ellen.

Yes that’s right, for some reason Ellen just knows when the shark is attacking members of her family. Director Joseph Sargent actually made an adult decision that turning Ellen Brody into the Derek Acorah of the shark world was actually something worth committing to celluloid. She also now somehow has sepia tinged flashbacks to events that she wasn’t even there for (e.g. Chief Brody killing the original shark and Sean's death). This itself brings up something that I’ve said before... If your movie is shit, then don’t put clips of other peoples much better movies in it, as it only highlights exactly how inept your movie is.

As ridiculous as this may sound, that’s not the worst thing about this movie though. In fact there are many things wrong with this film, that singling out the worst part is actually quite difficult. Perhaps it’s the fact that the shark now roars like a lion (sharks don’t have any organs for producing sound) or maybe it’s the fact that the shark follows the family to the Bahamas (it’s extremely rare for great whites to venture into tropical waters, it’s even rarer for one to target a specific family and follow them around) to continue its personal vendetta.

  

Personally I think the worst thing about this movie is that it’s a shark movie that ONLY HAS TWO SHARK ATTACK DEATHS. If I watch a movie which I know is about sharks, then the one thing I expect is a decent body count. The only shark film that I’ve ever seen with a lower shark kill rate than this was Open Water, and that’s only because it only had two people stranded in the water (and one drowns).

Being a shark film fan, you really have to have quite low expectations much of the time. They’ve been some great shark films made, but for every Jaws, Shark Night or Deep Blue Sea, you get a Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, Shark in Venice or Jersey Shore Shark Attack. But no matter how poorly acted these films may be, no matter how awful the special effects may look, no matter how bad the stories are, at least they have sharks attacking people! Even Sharktopus, with its roaring shark/octopus hybrid (which was the silliest idea for a shark movie before Sharknado came along), is at least a fun movie THAT HAS SHARK ATTACKS.

The acting in this movie isn’t really actually that bad. Loraine Gary fights against some awful scripting and plays Ellen much the same as she had done previously. Lance Guest is ok as Michael, although he seems to be playing a watered down version of Matt Hooper from the first movie (brilliantly played by Richard Dreyfuss).

Micheal Caine shouts the role of Hoagie in the way that he often shouts his roles. Sometimes he’s an absolutely incredible actor, but unfortunately this is one of his more forgettable performances (apart from the shouting). Mario Van Peebles however has an accent that wanders more than an albatross and that spoils an otherwise acceptable turn as Jake (Micheal's research partner).

The most unconvincing actor in this movie by far is the shark itself. It literally chews the scenery! Unlike the original movies, you actually get to see the shark a little more often. It’s seen swimming past Michael’s mini-sub, or in one awful moment pursuing Michael through a shipwreck. If the shark looked good, then this wouldn’t be so much of a problem, but it looks more rubbery than Lee Evans.

Also for some reason this shark can now float on the top of the water as it devours its meal (victim number 2 if you’re wondering), or just comes up to pose for the camera like it’s on The Caribbean’s Next Top Model. I’ve never seen this behaviour on Shark Week and would have been left wondering why, if I wasn’t aware that sharks don’t float! (Unless they’ve become victims of Pennywise the Clown in a Jaws/It crossover movie, which if Asylum Pictures haven’t already started work on, then that’s my idea! Clown Sharks: Laughing in the Face of Death).

So, we have a roaring shark, that makes psychic links with people whose husbands once killed a shark, that can float and can swim over a thousand miles in three days following a plane. I can only imagine Joseph Sargent and the writer (Michael De Guzman) sitting on a boat, getting drunk and re-enacting the scar scene from Jaws. But instead of scars, they just sat there and tried to out do each other with ridiculous ideas (“I got that beat… It can shoot lasers from it’s eyes!”).

Just to round everything off, this film has one of the strangest endings to a film I can think of (actually it has two endings, as test audiences didn’t like the original one). To kill the shark they rig a device to electrocute it from inside. That all sounds fine, but then, for no reason I can possibly imagine, they stab the shark with the pole at the front of the boat and IT EXPLODES. Originally there was no explosion, you just see the shark, that looks like a sock puppet now, being stabbed with the pole and then sinking (it’s on YouTube if you want to see how bad it looks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqiWWmAEfTA) 

  

There were a few bits I liked about the movie. There’s a nice homage to Jaws where Thea Brody (Judith Barsi) copies Micheal's actions whilst they are sitting at the table (just as Sean did with Chief Brody in the original). I also like the fact that this movie is a Christmas movie, which now means it’s joined my list of improbable Christmas movies (which also includes Die Hard, Chronos and Lethal Weapon amongst many others). I’m not sure however that it’s going to join the list of movies that I always watch over the Christmas period.

I have to admit that I had seen this movie before, but that was over ten years ago and my memory of it was rather hazy. I do remember that I absolutely hated it though, and I can now remember why. But things have changed slightly. I didn’t absolutely loathe the movie this time round. Sure it’s completely ridiculous, and the body count is lower than any random ten minutes of Game of Thrones, but it does have a certain charm. Perhaps it’s because even though it has the same look as the other Jaws films, it feels much more like a B-movie, and that’s never a bad thing.