Mike Brody appears to be totally over the events that struck his family in his youth and now works in Florida's newest underwater attraction Seaworld. His brother, Sean is less sure and never goes in the water although a visit to see Mike and a new girlfriend help him confront his fear if not get over it. Meanwhile, something is picking off staff and swimmers getting Mike and the staff out on a shark hunt. They capture a small great white and take it into captivity, only for it to die when it is put in too small a tank. They think their problems are over until an examination of the bite marks on some bodies and they realize that the shark that did the killing is much, much bigger than the one they caught.
I saw this film as a child but couldn't remember if it was any good or not my childish fears may have made it scary even if the film was poor, so I decided to give it a go again recently. The first thing that struck me was the sheer rubbishness of the effects. In the original Jaws, Spielberg had hidden the shark as much as he could because the effects didn't work (and also therefore upping the tension); however here the makers just decide to show anything a poorly superimposed image, a rubber shark, fake severed arms and so on none of them are concealed, they are all shown up in all their rubbish glory. I could forgive it this due to its age but two other films had already managed to handle this issue before this film so I don't see why they went this route when it so clearly didn't work. Some shots are so bad that they could have been mistaken for being a spoof (witness the shark swimming towards the control room).
Of course, after the poor effects the second thing that hits you is the laughable plot. True it is not as bad as part 4 in terms of plausibility but it is still pretty thin. No attempt is made to really give the characters any sort of, well, character and the very basic sea world plot just about manages to give the shark enough high profile feeding scenes to keep the film moving just don't hold your breath for any logic or sense. In fact, the opposite is true and this film does deliver some moments that make you wonder what the writers were thinking when they conceived some of this stuff! The manner of Jaws' death here would be hilarious if it wasn't so darn pathetic. Even with the plot being poor the film should still have had at least a few moment of fear and tension many of us fear being eaten alive so it isn't hard to draw on that, but this fails to have any tension or excitement to speak of. The effects suck a lot of this out but a director who's name is listed in the dictionary alongside the work 'workmanlike' didn't do anything to stop the rot either.
Without characters the cast are set adrift with nothing to do how Quaid must have envied Roy Schnieder in the first films, at least he was a good character. Quaid runs around the place, Armstrong screams, Putch broods, Thompson screams and Gossett tries to act tough in the middle of a script that gives him nothing to do. I don't blame the cast but I am disappointed that nobody mention how very bad taste it was to make a happy ending out of the dolphins surviving while so many other people had not!
Overall this is just a bad film. I'm not a big one for lists so I'll not play that game here but it is pretty much without any value at all. The plot is poor, the effects are rubbish, the direction is weak, the script just a load of nonsense and there is a total lack of tension, thrills or excitement. The original is a classic and this film is further proof that sometimes classics should be just left alone.
