July 18, 1987 | After all the dire reports of production delays, inclement weather and special-effects foul-ups, it should come as no great surprise that the problem-plagued Jaws: The Revenge looks like something haphazardly pieced together in a hurry.
It’s not difficult to imagine director Joseph Sargent and his editors frantically laboring in the editing room, hoping to manufacture something, anything, in time for a summer release. Their handiwork, alas, is anything but seamless. It’s bad enough that the sky and the water change color from shot to shot. But things get worse. At one point, actress Lorraine Gary is walking barefoot along the shore. There’s a change of camera angle, and — presto! — her shoes are back on. Then we cut back for a tighter shot, and — viola! — she’s unshod again. Talk about your movie magic.
What is surprising about Jaws: The Revenge is that, despite its often tatty appearance, the movie isn’t a complete botch. A fine cast performs far beyond the call of duty, generating credibility and genuine tension, even when the plot turns completely preposterous.
In case you’re counting, this is the third sequel to Jaws (1975), Steven Spielberg’s contemporary classic about a marauding man-eater off the coast of a New England resort town. (Everyone here behaves as though Jaws 3-D never happened, and I can’t say I blame them.) By now, Police Chief Brody (played in Jaws and Jaws 2 by Roy Scheider) is dead, the victim of heart failure caused by stress after saving Amity from two different sharks. Ellen Brody (once again played by Gary), the chief’s widow, is understandably nervous about going anywhere near the Amity coastline. And her fears worsen when her youngest son, Amity’s deputy police chief, is gobbled up by yet another shark.
So when Michael (Lance Guest), her eldest son, invites Mom to come down to the Bahamas, where he’s working underwater as a scientific researcher, she accepts. The good news is, she becomes romantically involved with Hoagie (Michael Caine), a freewheeling pilot fond of island hopping and casino gambling. The bad news is, a shark the size of a station wagon has entered the warm waters of the Bahamas, intent on enjoying another Brody blue-plate special.
Scriptwriter Michael de Guzman drops some broad hints that Ellen and Michael have some sort of psychic connection with the shark, strongly indicating that an entire family of great whites is carrying on a blood feud with the Brody clan. No kidding.
Despite these oddball touches, however, the plot is fairly routine. And there isn’t much of it: Despite some padding, the movie clocks in at under 80 minutes. Still, even though he shows us far too much of the mechanical beast, director Sargent whips up some mild suspense during the shark attacks.
Lorraine Gary plays Ellen as an attractive and intelligent mature woman, not the sort of character you usually see at the center of an action-adventure film. She has some nice scenes with Michael Caine, who invests his considerable screen presence into a role that amounts to little more than an extended cameo. Lance Guest as Michael, Karen Young as Michael’s wife and Mitchell Anderson as Michael’s briefly-seen brother are well cast. And Mario Van Peebles deftly steals just about every scene in which he appears as a sassy, dreadlock-braided marine biologist.
Roy Scheider makes a couple of fleeting appearances, in sepia-toned “flashbacks” lifted from the first Jaws film. His final line to the very first shark, repeated here, is still very funny. But Michael Caine is almost as comical when, having just survived a shark attack, he comments: “Bloody hell! The breath on that thing!”
