The original 1975 Jaws dominated the box office with its 50th anniversary screenings, pushing me to revisit the sequels after catching the classic at my local drive-in. While none ever came close to the first film’s success, the diminished returns, both critically and commercially, should be studied for how badly they were mishandled. I’ve always had a soft spot for Jaws 3-D thanks to childhood exposure, but Jaws: The Revenge was a blind spot until recently.
The fourth and final entry to the franchise tries to honor the greatest shark movie of all time, but sinks fast with inconsistent storytelling, hamfisted self-references, and laughably bad acting.
The Jaws: The Revenge Setup
Holding a 2 percent critical score on Rotten Tomatoes, Jaws: The Revenge insults canon, shamelessly reuses footage, and applies slasher rules to a shark movie. That may work for the Sharknado franchise, but not a Jaws film.
Back in Amity Island, Lorraine Gary returns as Ellen Brody, now widowed after Martin’s passing. Believing her late husband’s heart attack was tied to shark-induced PTSD, Ellen is horrified when her son Sean (Mitchell Anderson) is killed by a great white shark resembling Martin’s old nemesis.
Shaken, she lashes out at her other son, Michael (Lance Guest), who’s headed to the Bahamas for his marine biology research. Despite swearing she’ll never go near water again, the next scene shows her on a ferry.
Slasher Rules Applied To The Premise
Great whites avoid warm water, but not in Jaws: The Revenge. Days after Sean’s death, the shark follows everyone to the Bahamas because ‘this time, it’s personal.” At that point, I half-expected the apex predator to pop out of Ellen’s closet with a stocking over its face. If you give a shark a revenge arc, you may as well go all in.
Jaws The Revenge
Meanwhile, Michael Caine, who admitted he took the role to buy a house, provides limp comic relief as Hoagie, a free-spirited pilot and Ellen’s love interest who will eventually come to blows with the menacing shark that’s apparently watching his every move.
Streaming Jaws: The Revenge On Netflix
I could list problems with Jaws: The Revenge all day, but you need to witness this firsthand, from Mario Van Peebles’ cartoonish accent and the implication that sharks can roar to Roy Scheider’s recycled line from the original film, the movie strains to connect itself to the franchise. The result is so misguided that it almost becomes fascinating, a failed swing for the fences worth gawking at.
As of this writing, you can stream Jaws: The Revenge on Netflix.
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