JAWS 2 Bites It: The Trouble With Sequels

We’ve talked about it an awful lot in this space, but sequels are really hard.

It may not appear like quite such an obvious issue anymore, when movies are explicitly made with future sequels in mind (which make them doubly hilarious when they bomb fantastically and there’s no further installment, like the recent Tom Cruise MUMMY remake), but the goal of most movies truly was to tell a complete story from start to finish first, even if they would wind up getting second installments later on down the line anyway.

Which brings us to JAWS 2. I remember a time in my life when the discovery that there were several JAWS movies was legitimately mind-blowing. I’m almost certain this discovery was made by flipping through some late-90’s edition of the Leonard Maltin movie guide. “Holy shit, there are, like, three JAWS sequels!”, I undoubtedly thought to myself. Even at that early age, I never felt this strong desire to check them out. I loved the original film, and it was almost certainly one of the first Spielberg movies I ever saw, so it meant something to me. Besides, JAWS seemed to already have a definitive ending, none of the sequels were made by Spielberg and, most importantly, this was not yet the age of streaming where you could just pull just about anything on demand. Checking out JAWS 2, 3 and/or 4 required a trip to the video store or hoping it would just appear on TV one day. At nine, this felt like a massive undertaking.

So…forget it. Who needed it?

Smash cut to present day 2022, where watching inferior sequels to already-perfect things feel like sweet distraction from the existential dread I feel every day. Yay!

Luckily, JAWS 2 seems to exemplify just how difficult following up perfect movies truly is. Sure, it’s a natural instinct for studios with profitable hits on their hands to try to drill for more oil. But, as mentioned above, JAWS already told a story with a beginning, middle and end. So, the team assigned to the follow-up has a conundrum on their hands. Do you just try to do the original again, and risk it feeling stale? Do you go the complete opposite direction and risk losing the thread completely?

Well, as it turns out, there is a third option, which is to try to do it both ways. “Let’s sort of do JAWS again, but without what made it special, and we’ll add new stuff that we don’t really invest ourselves in. Let’s make some money!”

How do you think this went?

Let’s find out.

JAWS 2

Directed by: Jeannot Szwarc

Starring: Roy Scheider, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton

Written by: Carl Gottlieb, Howard Sackler

Released: June 16, 1978

Length: 116 minutes

The production of JAWS 2 turned out to be just as chaotic as the production of the original, if not more so. To begin with, Steven Spielberg initially refused to return for several reasons. For one thing, he didn’t exactly have a great time shooting on the water last time. The primary reason, though, was that he felt like he had already made the definitive shark attack movie, a belief that has pretty clearly borne itself out (although we should point out that it wasn’t JAWS that had Samuel L. Jackson get munched on in the middle of a rousing speech. Alas, I digress).

However, there was a time when Spielberg did indeed almost come back to direct. By 1976, JAWS 2’s original director, John D. Hancock, had been fired after the studio decided the darker tone the movie was starting to take wasn’t exactly what they had in mind for their light action movie. At that point, Spielberg swooped back in, letting Universal know he had created a preliminary screenplay based off the contents of Quint’s famous U.S.S. Indianapolis speech from the first film. This screenplay appears to have been an offshoot of JAWS 1 screenwriter Howard Sackler’s original pitch for the sequel, a young Quint prequel.

I’m going to jump in here to say that I actually think if Universal had cut its losses and scrapped what they had and started over with Spielberg, there’s a chance JAWS 2 could have at least been interesting. At that point, you have the original movie’s director and screenwriters back with an already structured story that would just need to be fleshed out. True, you run the risk of deflating the tension with the fact that we know our main character can’t die, but that might have been a risk worth taking.

At any rate, the sticking point for Spielberg’s return was CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, which he was tied up with for the next couple of years. Universal straight up didn’t want to wait that long for JAWS 2 to be released. Thus, that was the end of that, and a major missed opportunity passed itself by.

JAWS 2’s director ended up being Jeannot Szwarc, who had recently come off of making 1975’s BUG, a horror movie that incidentally wound up being William Castle’s last picture before passing away in 1977. He seemed to be a decent pick on paper, if an ultimately uninspired one. The good news is that Gottlieb and Sackler also came back to write the thing, although you can feel them trying throughout the entire runtime of JAWS 2 trying to figure out how to bring the magic back without repeating themselves.

What they ended up going with is continuing the story of Martin Brody’s tenure as sheriff of Amity Island, while also shifting some of the focus to a younger generation of possible shark entrees, hanging out and being sad, horny teenagers on the beach. A link between these two threads is provided with the return of the Brody kids, recast from the previous film; this time around, Michael Brody was played by Mark Gruner and Sean Brody was played by Marc Gilpin.

For Brody, he goes from having two other similar-but-wildly-different characters to bounce off of to essentially riding solo for most of JAWS 2. He butts heads with Mayor Vaughn when he suspects Amity is being stalked by another shark, and Ellen Brody is sort of more involved in the action this time around, but Brody feels quite a bit isolated for most of the runtime. This adds an interesting feeling to the character that increases when he’s relieved of his post about halfway through (it should be noted how good Scheider is in this). But this isolation isn’t something that the film really follows through with, at least not on purpose. There’s no real explicit catharsis attached to this by JAWS 2’s end. It feels like a happy, coincidental shade to the character,

I have to wonder if this movie would have been better served by streamlining the narrative to be solely about the Brody family, without throwing in the cadre of teenagers, all of whom we spend somehow way too much time with BUT not long enough to really feel anything for them. I had to look up most of their names on Wikipedia (and they are very 70’s teenager names; you’ve got a Marge, a Mike, a Jackie, and Eddie and a Tina) and even then, it’s a Herculean task for me to remember which one was which. It’s a big reason why large sections of this movie drags. We don’t have three tightly focused characters to draw our attention; now there’s, like, ten vague ones in the hopes that one of them hits.

There are some elements to JAWS 2 I liked. It was probably a good call to bring back Roy Scheider, even if it was practically by gunpoint; his appearance in the sequel was more or less to get out of his contract with Universal, and he made sure he was busy in 1983 when the third movie came a-callin’. Still, his presence gives the film an air of legitimacy, like it really is the Official Second JAWS Film. Same goes for Lorraine Gary, who gets “more to do” this time around, and Murray Hamilton, whose Mayor Vaughn is maybe twice as obstinate and hubristic here, which is both infuriating and sadly realistic.

To that end, JAWS 2 often confuses “frustration” for “conflict”. Naturally, when Brody starts to suspect there’s another shark in Amity, he isn’t automatically believed, which I suppose is a natural thing to suspect. But, beyond that, it really seems like everybody thinks the sheriff has gone insane? As an example, maybe the most memorable scene in the whole movie is where Brody, simmering with paranoia, finally thinks he spots a shark hovering around a packed beach, then storms over to evacuate the area with a loaded gun in his hand. As he aims at the ocean and fires away, it’s revealed it’s just a school of fish. Embarrassed and dazed, Brody looks defeated as everybody clears away from him.

It’s a great scene, one that manages to have both camp value (again, it’s Sheriff Brody running on a crowded beach with a loaded gun before proceeding to empty his entire clip into the ocean) and genuine heft. We like Brody so much that it sucks to see him at such a low point. You feel so shitty for him (again, Schieder. So good).

But, logically speaking, how did we even get to this point? Time and time again, Brody says all the evidence they have points to another great white in the area. And everybody just rolls their eyes like he’s losing it? Isn’t this the one guy in town that would know? Canonically, hasn’t it been barely three years since Alex Kintner got eaten by a shark, an event that would probably be permanently defining for a small town like this? Why not just take this shit seriously? I know the town is hosting some land developers for the weekend and don’t want any feathers ruffled, but why would risking another shark attack be the better alternative? An argument could be made that this is social commentary similar to the type JAWS 1 levied, but I’m not sure it is this time. It feels like just frustration so that the movie doesn’t stop thirty minutes in. This is fine, but it’s a far cry from the genuine conflict that drove the original JAWS.

Oh yeah, I guess this was supposed to be the section where I talked about what I liked. Um….I liked that JAWS 2 had the skeletal structure of an early slasher film, with a cadre of vaguely uninteresting teenagers and kids lined up at a remote place so that they can start getting mowed down one by one by a hard-to-view monster. Ironically, JAWS 2 predated the major slasher boom in American film by a couple of years. It beat HALLOWEEN by just four months! So there’s that.

However, I think the movie would have been best served by just picking a direction here. Either go with following the Brodys entirely, or focus on the kids. Splitting the difference just makes the movie feel like two half-stories put together. It should be noted, by the way, that the original JAWS didn’t really have a B-plot, one of the reasons why it felt so tight.

The biggest sin of JAWS 2, however, is that it’s just a slog to get through; it’s about ten minutes shorter than the original, and yet I checked the remaining runtime on several occasions, something nobody has ever done with JAWS 1. And this particular sin, unfortunately, lies at the feet of the film’s direction.

JAWS 2 has no real sense of pace or tension. There are pretty and intriguing shots (an early shot of Vaughn shot through a literal money tree is as clear an indicator of what the man is all about). But Szwarc is following up Steven Spielberg, the guy who has maybe the greatest natural understanding of a movie’s pace in the history of the medium. There’s not a lot of emotion to JAWS 2, nor any real build-up to anything. You don’t get any sense of how far into it you are, nor how much more you have left. You’re stranded at sea for most of this.

As an example of the failure to build tension, a crucial “suspenseful” sequence involves somebody frantically swimming towards the shark until GASP! the shark eats him. Whether this sequence is a literal, word-for-word interpretation of these particular pages of the script, or simply a grave blocking error, I can’t say. But it speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of what made the original JAWS tick, or even how an average action sequence works. It isn’t scary because…well, the shark doesn’t even have to catch him. He just has to kind of wait. Just like us.

I can’t claim to be super familiar with Jeannot Szwarc’s complete filmography; the only other movie of his I’ve seen was SUPERGIRL, which I ALSO thought was a jumbled mess of ideas that was dreadfully paced, so I confess to having my doubts about him. And, look, I understand why he said “yes” to the job. After all, what if JAWS 2 was good? What if it had lived up to expectations? It’s a career-making opportunity, and one he’d be foolish to pass up.

But the flip side to that kind of gamble is that, if the movie drags at all, it’s your name on the door. And JAWS 2 fucking drags, the one thing JAWS 1 never did. It didn’t appear to affect Szwarc’s career too much. He made about a dozen films afterwards, as well as a ton of TV.

But I keep coming back to that moment when Universal could have gotten Spielberg back, and JAWS 2 was a prequel, rather than a sequel. And, look, chances are it wouldn’t have been perfect; Spielberg’s track record on sequels is a bit of a mixed bag.

However, when alternate versions of movies can only remain theoretical, it’s easy to fantasize about how much better they would be (see: Colin Trevorrow’s DUEL OF THE FATES). And fantasize I did. What else could I do? JAWS 2 presented too many opportunities for my mind to wander.

Next week: let’s try again with JAWS 3-D, shall we?