From two sets of toothy predators to another... Welcome to Shark Week 2: Shark Harder. In preparation for The Meg coming out later this week, we're having another week of sharksploitation movies, and since we started off the last Shark Week with the granddaddy of them all, Jaws, it's only right that we start the sequel off with Jaws 2.
Three years after the events of the first movie, Martin Brody is still police chief on Amity Island, which is now building a hotel development to keep the tourist money rolling in. Chief Brody might be seen to be a little bit obsessive when it comes to sharks and water safety on the island, but that's understandable, really. Unfortunately for the island, a new great white shark has arrived in the waters around the island, having apparently heard that the eating is good there, and soon scuba divers, waterskiers, a killer whale and hapless teenagers are all on the menu. Chief Brody recognises the dangers and tries to warn the town again, but after an unfortunate incident where he unloads his police revolver into a school of bluefish, the town council fire him, dismissing his evidence of the new shark's existence because (once again) it would be bad for the town's business. if there were shark rumours floating (hah) about. Brody isn't too concerned about this... until he learns that his sons have gone on a sailing day trip with several of the town's other teens, and the shark is heading right for them, Can Brody come out victorious a second time against one of nature's most dangerous predators?
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water... Originally, Universal wanted a sequel to Jaws pretty soon after that film's success. Steven Spielberg, however, refused point-blank to make a sequel, calling them "cheap carny trick[s]" and not even returning the producers' call when they asked him if he wanted to direct Jaws 2. They then got John D Hancock to direct, but when he had some "creative differences" with the producers and the president of Universal, he was fired and replaced with Jeannot Szwarc (whose other film credits include the 1984 Supergirl movie and Santa Claus: The Movie) who managed to stay on until the end. Meanwhile, Roy Scheider, who played Chief Brody in this and the previous film, was also reluctant to return to the role. Eventually, a combination of being paid $400,000 plus a percentage of the film's net profits and a deal with Universal to forgive his failure to complete a contractual obligation to them (he had quit his role in The Deer Hunter despite being under a three-movie contract at the time) led him to return. These and other production issues, as we've seen from other films recently, tend to lead to foreboding on the part of the audience/reviewer, however...
For one thing, how do you follow a movie like Jaws? Despite what later films (*cough*Jaws: The Revenge*cough*) might have wanted us to believe, sharks are rather solitary predators and not known for bearing grudges or avenging their fellow fish. Thankfully, this was the 1970s, and no-one had yet thought of having the shark return from the grave as a zombie shark or making it a pawn of an ancient sea-druid order. So we just got a new shark in the Amity Island area, swimming around and eating people, with no further explanation needed.
Jaws 2 is a lot more like a traditional teen slasher movie than the first movie as well - primarily because of its focus in the second half on the hapless teens trapped and stalked by the shark, but also because of the odd decision to have the shark injured early on in the film. While attacking one woman on a boat, the shark is burned across half of its head by an explosion, and so when we next see it, it's effectively become a great white Freddy Krueger. I'm not entirely sure what the reasoning behind this was - it's not like there were other sharks around and we needed to single out "our" shark for easy reference, and it's a shark - it doesn't need to look any scarier when it's got that many teeth to begin with.
Another proto-slasher moment is the way that Chief Brody (the woodcutter, the adult authority figure) has to come to the rescue of the trapped teens. If Jaws 2 had been made only a few years later, I suspect the teens, or more specifically one or two surviving teens - would have come up with a way to kill the shark themselves (which may or may not have involved Chekov's Underwater Power Cable, as it does in the actual film). The studio's desire for a strictly PG rating, however, meant that the body count was trimmed somewhat, and nowhere is that more noticeable than in the fact that only one teenager ends up shark food, and bloodlessly at that. I wasn't particularly hoping for most of the teens to become chum (okay, maybe I was a bit, because some of them were annoying), but if you're making a shark movie and your entire third act is focused on this group of nearly ten teenagers, you can afford to lose more than one.
Jaws 2 suffers for being a film made not because there was another story to tell, but because people wanted to make more money out of a sequel. It has some nods to the previous film (the wreck of the Orca right at the start was a nice touch), but a lot of the other "callbacks" are pretty much just retreads of the first film's plot. It was still the most successful of all the Jaws sequels though and was even the most successful sequel in film history until Rocky II came out the next year. But it was also a flawed, unnecessary and overall weak follow-up to a movie that didn't need a sequel (and newsflash Hollywood: there are a lot of movies that don't need sequels; stop trying to force them onto everything).
Oh, and the mechanical sharks still didn't work right.
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