Review of Jaws 2 (1978) by Juli N — 24 Apr 2014

Did you like Jaws but think it didn't have enough teenage angst? Then this is the film for you! This movie makes me appreciate what a flash in the pan the first film was. It was always going to be hard to make a sequel to a film named after the antagonist who's killed at the end of the first film (spoilers). In that film the shark was impersonally hunting human flesh until near the end when they pissed it off. This time the shark seems to be specifically targeting Brody's family, though not as obviously as in the sequels.

The main difference between this film and the first is the absence of any sort of drama or anticipation. When making Jaws Spielberg had originally intended to show the shark right from the beginning, making it a typical B-Movie monster flick. Only a malfunctioning animatronic shark forced him to rethink that idea and keep the shark hidden until quite near the end. Here the shark is present from the beginning, robbing us of the horrid thrill that comes from not knowing what will happen next. While that film switched back and forth between scenes of fresh victims and Chief Brody's hunt it always managed to keep Brody in the foreground. Here, Brody's not much more than a bit player. He has some interesting character development as a man driven paranoid by his last encounter, but there isn't much to do with it because to have that intersect with the shark attacks would make him obviously right and not paranoid.

So the scenes of people being eaten are just that: horror movie shock deaths. They don't advance the plot and people don't care about them. If you think about it, the first Jaws film had a very low death count. There was the girl at the beginning, the little kid, that guy in the boat, and Quint. Here we start off with two deaths, then work our way up to I think eight. And they're not spaced very well either. Apparently deciding that killing swimmers has been done before Jaws is now after kids in boats. Oh yeah, it adopts the horror cliche of targeting only teenagers. When I realized that one girl was going out in a boat to have sex with her boyfriend I knew they were dead. The focus on teenagers leads to another problem: characters. I didn't care about a one of the new guys, and what's more there were so many of them that they were indistinguishable. Apart from Brody's youngest kid I couldn't tell them apart. While the first film's strength was its team of cool shark hunters this one just has indistinguishable teenagers whose relationships neither matter nor seem interesting.

Worse still, the film takes itself seriously. While the later Jaws films are firmly in 'so bad it's good territory' this one is just good enough that it isn't funny. Apart from a few scenes (the helicopter for instance) I didn't laugh once.