“You’ll never go into the water again… AGAIN” should be the tagline for French filmmaker Jeannot Szwarc’s follow-up to the world’s first cinematic summer blockbuster, Jaws. Jaws 2 came in 1978, just three years after Spielberg’s masterpiece, and tried its best to replicate the accidental magic that the original film unleashed. So much so, that it’s garnered a debatable legacy as the second-best shark movie of all time.
Spielberg originally wanted to turn the second film into a Quint-centered prequel that focused on his famous adlibbed USS Indianapolis story, but Universal and Spielberg’s schedules couldn’t line up, and the director left the project, which would become a one-year-later follow-up, bringing back almost the entire main cast sans Richard Dreyfuss, and a new sharp-toothed terror.
Jaws 2 was much less of a character study than its predecessor and shot straight into slasher-like territory, as the shark dispatched teenagers left and right. Looking through a realistic lens, we as the viewer could only assume this was a new shark hellbent on revenge for its fallen comrade. However, haven’t we seen Michael Myers get shot, blown up, and decapitated, yet still come back for more murder?
So here we are, a year later, Brody is still the Chief of Police, at least until Mayor Vaughn, who is somehow still the mayor in the sequel, decides he’s had enough of Brody’s insinuations that there could be another shark, and fires him for daring to question the mayor’s judgment in shark-related matters.
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Meanwhile, the shark is chomping through Amity teens like there’s no tomorrow, and while Jaws 2 never truly captures the brutality of Quint or Alex Kintner’s deaths in the first movie, there are some slasher-esque schlock moments, like the shark chasing a water skier (which was a beautiful shot, by the way), Brody creating cyanide-tipped bullets to aid his hunt, and of course, the all-too confusing scene of a woman covering herself with gasoline before shooting a flare at the shark and blowing herself up.
Jaws 2 had just enough connections to the original to keep the nostalgia flowing. Fans would find themselves pointing at the screen in a Leonardo DiCaprio-memed fashion when the initial divers that are attacked in the opening scene are photographing the wreckage of the Orca, when John Williams’ recognizable score popped up, or when they realized Chief Brody turned one of the barrels from the Orca into a porch planter. These were the benefits of bringing back the screenwriter of the first film, Carl Gottlieb.
The inclusion of so many actors from the original didn’t hurt, either. It wasn’t just the main actors, either. Deputy Hendricks had a bigger role, Ellen Brody got more involved in the action (as a precursor to Jaws: The Revenge, of course), and we even saw Harry, who had some bad hat.
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The pacing of Jaws 2 was lightning-quick, too, which was a bit of a double-edged sword. On one hand, it kept the audience entertained, but on the other hand, the film was constantly moving between characters and shifted around so much that almost no development was created this time around.
Though we did get a focus on Brody’s PTSD after the events of the first film, which was on full display as he ran into a crowd of beach goers firing his pistol into the water.
With that being said, the final act of Jaws 2 was thrilling, and even upped the stakes from the original, as not only was the shark stalking a group of teens (including Brody’s own children) in a movie where kids and teens routinely get snacked on, but the shark bringing down the rescue helicopter is one of the scariest and most intense scenes in the franchise.
The original Jaws is a near-perfect film, and it’s my favorite movie of all time, but even with being biased, Jaws 2 was a more-than-serviceable sequel to a movie that never really needed a continuation movie (let alone three). It was also extremely successful, raking in $187 million against its $20 million-dollar budget, making it one of the most profitable creature features of all time.
Simply put, even after 45 years, Jaws 2 has never gotten the credit it deserved because of the success of the first one, and it wasn’t that far off; it just lacked some of the naturally fitting pieces that turned Jaws into an accidental legend. And honestly, there hasn’t really been a shark movie released since Jaws 2 that has come close in level of quality or intensity.
I guess you could say this is my campaign to go back and add a “2” to all those “The Best Shark Movie Since Jaws!” review claims we hear every year, with the release of every single shark movie.
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