After the smash-success of Jaws, it was really impossible for there not to be a sequel, and just as the first movie became one of the most influential monster movies of all time, Jaws 2 would become the stencil-applied to a thousand Horror-sequels, and is often credited as actually instigating a number of elements that would later become synonymous with the slasher sub-genre.

Now, its a popular viewpoint that all of the Jaws sequels were rubbish, something that the two movies which follow this one wholeheartedly enforce, however, while it may not match up to it's predecessor(but then, what does?), Jaws 2 isn't by any stretch of the imagination a bad picture, and although it may seem quite tired and cliched by today's standards, it's still a very watchable and quite engaging little picture for the fan of the original movie.

Sadly, director Steven Speilberg turned down making the project. He had no interest in working on a sequel, and more importantly, he was working on Close Encounters of the Third Kind at the time, so had even less interest in abandonning that. The same movie was also being worked upon by Richard Dreyfuss, who played shark-expert Matt Hooper in the original movie, which ruled him out of proceedings, but thankfully producers David Brown and Richard D. Zanuck managed to coax Roy Schneider into reprising his role as Police Chief Brody, the man who killed the original Great White which terrorised Amity 4 years prior.

However, Jaws 2 was faced with disadvantages from the get-go. Firstly, the film had an incredibly hard act to attempt to follow in Jaws, one of the top-grossing movies ever, and a near-flawless masterpiece. Sequels often struggle to live up to their prequels, and Jaws 2 was always going to struggle in this respect, especially without characters like Hooper and Robert Shaw's Quint or Spielberg's direction. However, it wasn't aided in it's struggle by other factors, such as the fact it wasn't based upon a best-selling novel, although there was a book called Jaws 2, it wasn't written by Peter Benchley, and many discard it's relevance, although it does, apparently, make clearer some details about this story's shark(it's the mate of 'Bruce' from the original), which is something the film could actually have benefitted from.
Further hampering the movie was the firing of the first-hired director, John Hancock, whose view for the film didn't match that of Universal, who simply wanted to place a group of teens in danger and have Brody kill the shark. Hancock apparently desired to flesh out these teens, but he, and his version of the script, were eschewed in favour of the version of the story we see today, which is basically a number of action sequences with something that resembles a story weaved around them, and Jeannot Szwarc in the director's chair.

The movie is set 4 years after the giant shark attacked the small US Island of Amity, where it was killed by local police chief Brody after a lengthy battle. Things have returned to normal now, with Brody's two sons, Michael(Mark Gruner - The Fantastic Planet) and Sean(Marc Gilpin - Eathbound) can play on the water until their hearts are content, something which suits the older boy, Mike, perfectly as he courts girls on his boat.

Brody's wife Ellen(Lorraine Gary - Car Wash) also now holds down a good job, working for a sleazy businessman named Peterson(Joseph Mascolo - Gangster Wars) who has openend up a series of condo's and a large hotel on Amity, a project that Mayor Vaughn(Murray Hamilton - Damnation Alley) thouroughly endorses.

However, when 2 divers go missing around the area that The Orca, the boat which Brody went out on in the first movie, sunk, and a Killer Whale washes up with what look like bites out of it, Brody quickly puts 2+2 together and comes to the conclusion that Amity has a shark problem again. Naturally Vaughn doesn't want to hear this, especially with the condos opening soon, so Brody is once again told to keep it hushed. However, when he causes a scene on the beach after mistaking a 'school of blue fish' for a shark, he is fired, and has to face it that maybe a shark isn't really behind this.

Despite his father's protestations, Mike sneaks out to his boat, with Sean in tow, to try and woo a girl, but the situation here takes a turn for the worse as the Shark shows up at the beach and decides to make it very clear how real it is, and the group of youngsters who went out on their small boats are forced to tie them together and get pulled by the tide as this vicious brute pursues them deeper into the ocean.

Thankfully, Brody catches wind of this, and with his deputy/the new police chief, Hendricks(Jeffrey Kramer - Halloween 2) taking him out in the Police Boat, Brody engages in a race against time to rescue the kids before they become lunch for another shark, but will Brody be able to stop this one?

Before I go any further, it is worth pointing out that Jaws 2 does take the wholely unoriginal step of rehashing far too much of the original movie's plot for it's own health. When Brody screams 'Shark', everyone is adamant he is crazy, but I mean, weren't they there 4 years ago? After the outright carnage the first shark caused, you'd think the Mayor would have been more than willing to listne to Brody's claims.

The entire 'teens in peril' plot also didn't really do all that much to excite me. There are very few occasions where they are actually placed in direct danger, because the mass of boats they are on is so large that the shark can't really get anywhere near them, despite the fact that, as we all know, the shark is supposed to be strong enough to barge through the hull of ships and, in one of the movie's most laughable scenes, pull a small helicopter under-the-water.

With that said, I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the movie, as far as brainless entertainment goes, Jaws 2 is easily the best Jaws rip-off I've seen, although that's really more down to the acting and budget afforded to the movie than anything to do with the plot.

With that said, Szwarc does have some nice camera techniques up his sleeve, including placing a cameraman on a cowboy-like saddle on the back of one of the rubber sharks and filming it from 'Fin-perspective' which works quite well, but Szwarc isn't Spielberg, and a lot of the shots do come off as rather 'by-the-numbers', which is a bit disappointing.

The film also does manage to make it's action-set-pieces, of which it is built around, entertaining, if, in some cases, unfathomably stupid, for example the aformentioned helicopter sequence and the scene in which the shark outpaces a speedboat, but I do believe Szwarc deserves some credit for managing to inject these sequences with enough style to keep the adrenaline flowing and the action fan in me happy. I mean, the film is never as scary or nerve-shredding as the original, but then, it doesn't seem to be trying to be, on an interview included in my DVD, Szwarc makes the point that he saw no point in trying to conceal the shark, as we've already seen it in the original movie, and while this is true, they really didn't have the capabilities to create a life-like shark, so it ends up just looking a little dumb in places.

Not to completely write off the effects, I mean, Bruce has went over a bit of a make-over, and the new shark model sports scars and a burn, courtesy of the speedboat driver, as well as having two incarnations, a motorised one mounted on an underwater rig as well as just a plain ol' rubber shark. As I say, we see too much of them, which spoils the effect, but they certainly aren't the worst shark effects cinema has ever seen, and the stock footage of real sharks swimming is inserted nicely.

As I mentioned earlier, one of the movie's main saving graces is it's acting, or more specifically the acting of Roy Schneider. I have to confess I haven't seen many movies starring Schneider, but his performances as the tortured everyman Brody across the first 2 Jaws movies have sold me on him as a very talented man, and if anything, his performance here may actually better his one from the first film, in that he now gets to act slightly paranoid, yet in an understandable and sympathetic fashion.
The film's main flaw when it comes to acting is that it doesn't have enough 'big guns' to follow up the first movie, which augmented Schneider's performance with equally brilliant showings from Dreyfuss and Shaw as opposites on the Orca. While Murray Hamilton is fantastic in his role, and Lorraine Gary good support, both roles are no more than support, which doesn't help. Hamilton's role seems especially miniscule, although he was forced to leave the project early due to his wife falling ill, so perhaps some of his scenes were trimmed.
Sadly, the 'teens in peril' in the movie leave the audience in peril with their woeful acting. I honestly think they could have struggled to find a more annoying group of teens with less acting capabilities, even if they had comprised their cast of kids who starred in the Halloween sequels.

What does help keep the movie, if you'll pardon the pun, afloat, is the return of John Williams' fantastic theme music, which is an excercise in tension building in itself. While it isn't as effective when teamed with the less suspenseful sequences of this movie, it's still clear why it is one of cinema's most famous pieces of music.

Overall, I do feel that Jaws 2 has it's merits, but trying to compare it to it's predecessor would be an incredibly silly thing to do. The first film was a classic, the second is entertaining enough, but it really, if you'll once again pardon the pun, lacks the bite of the original movie, despite having a higher body-count features drastically less gore, lacks any real good acting outwith the few returning players from the first movie and suffers from something that could really only be seen with the power of hindsight...the uprising of the 'teens-in-peril' horror movie that makes this one seem a hell of a lot more cliched and tired than it probably was back in 1978 when it was released. I'd still recommend the movie, but not in the same way I would the original picture, this is really a fun and quite disposable little horror number, admittedly slicker than any other attempt to recapture the Jaws formula, by Universal or any other studio, but still not really a patch on it.

Review also posted on DooYoo.co.uk

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV