Jaws 2

The internet seems to love to shit on Jaws 3 and 4 (The Revenge) and I don’t really disagree that they’re terrible films.  But Jaws 2 is always skipped over for some reason.  Why?  Why don’t you get senselessly angry and shit on Jaws 2 webernet?  Not good enough for ya?  Fine.  I guess I’ll have to do it.

But before we dive in (ouch, that was a bad one) let’s talk about the original a little.  Back when I started this here blob thingy a Jaws piece was one of the first things I did.  Honestly it’s not my best effort but I did hit most of the points I wanted to.  Re-watching it again however brought something new to light that I’d like to bring up.

The New Englanders (or “islanders” as they’re called) are kinda portrayed as morons.  First the mayor wants to keep the beaches open and gets his crew to back him on the bogus boating accident theory.  I understand he wants tourists to vacation there so the town can survive but he doesn’t want to take any precautions in case Brody is right about a shark.  The mayor bullies Brody to get his way.  Then after the Kintner boy is gobbled up (that’s two victims total) the townspeople are upset that the beaches will be closed.  Turns out only to be for twenty four hours but still, these folks look callous in the wake of recent events.  When a large shark is caught after the $3,000 reward is posted the mayor won’t listen to the shark expert, Hooper, to perform an autopsy to confirm that it’s the killer they’ve been looking for (and it’s not).  If this wasn’t bad enough look at the three guys who finally take Jaws down.  It’s Brody, a transplanted NYC cop, Quint, an Englishman, and well, ok we never find out where Hooper is from.  But still Brody is the one that throws the oxygen tank into Jaws’ mouth and also shoots it to blow that beast to smithereens.  Really the islanders are relegated to background characters, idiots and lunch.

To add even further insult to New Englanders no islander has the trademark Bostonian accent.  Instead they all speak with a New York inflection for some reason.

Alright with that out of the way let’s check out that sequel.  Oh the goddamn inevitable sequel.

For number two here the filmmakers treated the material much more like a slasher picture.  This is kinda interesting because this came out the same year as Halloween (1978) which is commonly agreed to have started the subgenre proper (you had precursors like Psycho, Black Christmas and a bunch of Italian horror but everyone and their mother wanted to make a Halloween knock off after it grossed big bucks).  The focus is switched from adults to teens, Brody’s son in particular.  The promiscuous kiddies drink, disobey their parents and at least hint at having sex, which cannot go unpunished so they become the main targets.

Plot-wise you got a lot of the same shit.  There’s a new shark in town (not Jaws, that was the first one; I refuse to call this one Jaws so instead I’m going to use: the shark) and he’s itching to try out the local cuisine.  Brody knows immediately they’ve got another situation on their hands but of course no one believes him, or wants to believe him.  In fact they sack his ass because he’s ranting and raving like a lunatic.  Brody and the shark eventually have a showdown and the shark dies.  The end.

This time the townspeople have every right not to believe Brody when he lays the shark shit on them again.  He doesn’t have any solid proof or witnesses that he can produce.  It’s supposed to seem sad when Brody loses his job but it’s weird that he still works in Amity as the chief of police in the first place.  After the horrific events of the first film you know that had to have turned into one awkward ass town to stay in.  Everyone giving you weird looks and murmuring behind your back about that one summer (remember, no one who lives in Amity actually saw the shit that went down in the last half hour of the first movie; it must’ve sounded like an absurdly exaggerated account when Brody and Hooper laid it all out).  I don’t blame the townspeople for what they do to Brody in part 2 but fuck ‘em, he’ll do better somewhere near less water.

Probably the strangest thing in the movie is when Body places cyanide on the tips of his bullets and then melts wax over the poison to encase it.  This is fairly early on in the picture after the shark eats a water skier and the lady driving the boat.  What makes this attack so funny is the shark is thrusting and jumping at the boat at full force like in the finale of the first installment which looks ridiculous.  There’s no build up to it.  The filmmakers wanted to hit you hard towards the beginning and leave themselves no place to go.  Anyway the broad in the motorboat panics and grabs a canister of gasoline to presumably throw at the shark but ends up clumsily soaking herself.  She then proceeds to shoot a fucking flare gun in the boat causing everything to go on fire (shark included) and the entire boat blows up (shark’s ok though).  So there’s no evidence of a shark attack left behind, just an exploded boat.  For this Brody must lace his bullets with cyanide.  You could say he gets a little paranoid.

Even Brody knows that infamous unmissable yellow barrel 

from the first installment doesn’t make sense being there

There are a lot of callbacks to the original like the surprise reveal of a corpse in the water, “wanna fool around?”, one of Quint’s yellow barrels is a planter outside the Brodys’ home, young girl gets googly eyed boy to come to the beach, Brody gets drunk, a false alarm where everyone evacuates the water in a frenzy, Brody brings on an expert to help him understand what’s going on (although this character only lasts one scene), the Orca makes a cameo and etc.    

One of the biggest problems is the pacing.  It starts off fine but then there’s a forty five minute stretch without a shark attack (not counting the false alarm).  And at that point there’s only a partial attack where it’s unclear if the victim got bit at all.  When he’s brought out of the water (still alive by the way) then we can see that he’s bleeding but the scene wasn’t done properly to convey that this guy got hurt.  So really it’s fifty minutes until the shark starts murdering folks again.  And the pace suddenly kicks up during the last half hour when the shark goes after people left and right.  It’s too uneven and the long shark-less part in the middle leaves you scratching your head.

Michael, Brody’s son, is another mystery.  He was supposed to have been traumatized from seeing a man eaten alive by a 25 foot shark and barely dodging the same fate himself in the first film.  But here all he wants to do is go sailing and hang out at the beach as if nothing had happened.  You’re saying he got over that unforgettable episode?  Sure it’s possible but that’s a hard severed leg to swallow my friends.  To see the Brody boys so antsy to get in the water doesn’t add up for me.  But then again nothing adds up.

I mean this is just dumb.  It’s a dumb fuckin’ movie.  You know how McClane says “how can the same shit happen to the same guy twice” in Die Hard 2?  Jaws 2 takes that one step further by having the same shit happen to the same guy in the same location twice.  What is it about Amity that attracts vicious mammoth goddamn sharks?  At this point it really kind of is supernatural like how Freddy always preys on kids on Elm Street or Michael Myers always goes after teens in Haddonfield.  Great white sharks are always in Amity, that’s just the way it is.

The only angle that’s kinda cool is Brody going legitimately crazy.  But they play it cheesy where he turns out to be the sole person right about a killer shark on the loose.  They could’ve gone in a very different direction with a film about Brody not being able to cope with his job, life and the ocean at large.  No actual shark, only a haunted past and a fraught present.  But who the fuck is going to wanna see that shit?  I’m not saying they should’ve done that but it would’ve been way more fascinating than a half assed slasher picture.

Even the ending with the shark taking down a fucking helicopter is so stupid and makes the animal look too smart.  Like when the teenagers are forced to cobble together their sailboats after the shark destroys most of their crafts it feels like the fuckin’ thing plotted it all out.  But it didn’t look too damn smart when it bit into that electrical cable frying it to kingdom come with smoke pouring out of its eye sockets.  It’s a spectacularly silly demise that admittedly I did enjoy a little.

And that one attack where the beauty queen’s boyfriend gets dragged towards their boat slamming right into it is a well done scene.  It has a grittiness to it that the rest of the movie lacks. 

Ok and the John Williams score is good too.  It’s certainly not as memorable as the original but there are nice moments and they make use of the iconic theme.  Hey, even a half-baked John Williams score is still pretty great.

So there you have it internet, Jaws 2.  I remember it not being very good when I first saw it a very long time ago but this is worse than I remembered.  It’s so thoughtless.  Look guys, there’s Jaws and then fuck everything else.