Despite the presence of respectable thespians Dennis Quaid, Louis Gossett Jr., and Lea Thompson, Jaws 3-D is one big subpar set piece. Lacking both the suspense and the strong characters of the Steven Spielberg original and its halfway-decent sequel, the film is notable mostly for its theme-park setting and its prodigious body count. The shots of people hanging out in a series of underwater tunnels are memorable, as is a sequence that shows a victim being eaten from inside the shark. But first-time director Joe Alves displays little of the finesse he employed as production designer on the first two entries in the franchise. The audience sees way too much of the angry shark to maintain the sense of unknown menace that pervaded Spielberg's film, while the script falls into every don't-mess-with-nature cliché imaginable. As one of the potential victims, Bess Armstrong gets to grit her teeth a lot, just as she would a decade later as Angela's mom on My So-Called Life, but she can't be feeling any more frustration than the audience. A set of 3-D glasses may restore Jaws 3-D's cheap special effects to their original configuration, but they can't make this dud any more watchable.