Jaws: The Revenge

Directed by Joseph Sargent, Jaws: The Revenge follows Lorraine Gary’s Ellen Brody as she becomes convinced that a great white shark is stalking the surviving members of her family (including Lance Guest’s Michael and Judith Barsi’s Thea). Filmmaker Sargent, working from a script by Michael de Guzman, admittedly does an effective job of kicking the proceedings off with some promise, as Jaws: The Revenge opens with an impressively tense sequence wherein Mitchell Anderson’s Sean Brody is pursued and killed by a shark – with the movie, past that point, seguing into an exceedingly deliberate (and often hopelessly silly) midsection that boasts few compelling, interesting attributes. The underwhelming atmosphere, which is compounded by a premise that doesn’t even really make sense (ie what’s this random shark even seeking revenge for?), ensures that the picture’s 89 minute running time generally feels much, much longer, and although Sargent has included a very small handful of engaging interludes (eg Michael is pursued by the shark through a sunken ship), Jaws: The Revenge concludes with an astonishingly anticlimactic battle that does, in the end, cement its place as an entirely misbegotten capper to a seriously erratic series.

** out of ****