Jaws

Directed by Steven Spielberg, Jaws details the chaos that ensues within a small island community after an enormous great white shark begins attacking its various inhabitants – with the film, for the most part, subsequently following Roy Scheider’s police chief Martin Brody as he teams up with a marine biologist (Richard Dreyfuss’ Hooper) and a grizzled fisherman (Robert Shaw’s Quint) to kill the beast. There’s ultimately little doubt that Jaws fares best in its opening half hour, as Spielberg, working from a script by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb, does a superb job of establishing (and sustaining) an atmosphere of incredible tension – with the movie’s justifiably legendary opening paving the way for an engrossing first act that’s heightened by both Scheider’s magnetic performance and the inclusion of several unbearably tense interludes. (In terms of the latter, it is, in the final analysis, difficult to do much better than the sequence wherein Scheider’s Brody anxiously keeps an eye on a beach full of potential victims.) It’s only as the movie progresses into its increasingly uneven midsection that one’s interest begins to flag, as the narrative, which boasts more than a few lulls (eg Brody and Hooper drunkenly attempt to locate the shark themselves), suffers from a distressingly padded-out feel that’s exacerbated by an ongoing emphasis on the three protagonists’ uneventful (and distinctly repetitive) exploits at sea. (Quint’s justifiably legendary story about his time on the USS Indianapolis is a rare highlight within this stretch.) And although the less-than-threatening nature of the title creature is, admittedly, not as problematic as one might’ve feared, Jaws is, when everything’s said and done, unable to wholeheartedly live up to its place as a classic man-vs-beast thriller.

**1/2 out of ****