(1987) 1.5 Jeremy Wheeler Simply put, Jaws: The Revenge is a mess. Not only do the filmmakers expect the audience to believe that the shark follows Ma Brody from Amity Island all the way down to the Bahamas, but then they also throw in psychic connections as well as a roaring shark to boot! Welcome to the wild world of Jaws: The Revenge, where the rules are chomped up and spat out like rotten chum. Cast-wise, there's Michael Caine, who lost out on accepting his Oscar thanks to this production, plus The Last Starfighter's Lance Guest, Mario Van Peebles with a dreadful Jamaican accent, and of course, a haggard Lorraine Gary in the film that unfortunately brought her out of retirement. For the record, the first two thirds of the movie are atrociously boring. It's around the hour mark that the film goes buck-wild nuts and never turns back. The shark really turns into a main character at this point as he eats up more screen time than any of his predecessors. The crystal-clear water doesn't really help either -- making it easier to see the rigging and puppeteer rods that show up multiple times in the film's 91-minute running time. The finale is an even bigger botch job made even more intriguing by its multiple endings. There is the ending that test audiences saw, the different ones shown in theaters around the globe, and yet another one thrown in for video and DVD. Mario Van Peebles lives in some and dies in others, while the shark's death ranges from a bloody skewering to an exploding dummy depending on the print. Either way, the tour de force ending is a lesson in bad-movie bliss as Ma Brody pilots her sailing ship into the heart of the roaring shark, thus ending the psychic feud of the Brodys and the great whites. Amazingly, the jaw-dropping entertainment doesn't stop there, as the rest of the scene plays out in a pool whose horizon line is clearly splashing against a cement wall painted like the sky. Yes, Jaws: The Revenge is spectacularly special in all the wrong ways, making this a perfectly dreadful fourth film in a series that had already lost most of its juice long before this sucker swam to the surface.

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Jaws: The Revenge on AllMovie

Jaws: The Revenge (1987)

Jaws: The Revenge

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Violence
Graphic Violence
Adult Situations
Not For Children
Adult Language

genres

Horror

sub-genres

Creature Film

category

Feature

directed by

Joseph Sargent

countries

USA

release date

July 17, 1987 (USA)

run time

87 min.

produced by

Universal, Joseph Sargent Productions

released by

Universal

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by Robert Firsching synopsis

This third sequel to the 1975 mega-hit Jaws returns Lorraine Gary to the role of Ellen Brody, widow of the Roy Scheider character from the first two films. When her son Sean, the current police chief of shark-plagued Amity Island, is killed by the beast, Ellen goes to the Bahamas to comfort her surviving son. Michael Brody (Lance Guest) and his friend Jake (Mario Van Peebles) are marine biologists there to help, but in the end it is up to Ellen and her new beach-bum love -- played by Michael Caine -- to put a halt to the fishy horror. Director Joseph Sargent concludes the series with an ending chosen from several alternate possibilities.

characteristics

- When Animals Attack

- Stalker

- Stalked

- Sea

- Stalking

- Shark

- Swimmer

- Water

- Terror

- Swimming

- Prey

- Murder

- Carnivorous

- Carnivore

- Beach

related movies

WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK

TERROR IN THE WATER