BEFORE: Might as well finish off the franchise - but who's getting revenge, the shark? And just how far did this franchise go off the rails - was Spielberg right to abandon it after the first film?
THE PLOT: The long suffering wife of Chief Brody decides she's had enough of Amity and heads off to the Caribbean to join her son, daughter-in-law and grandchild. However, the shark with an attitude just won't leave her alone...
AFTER: Someone forgot to sign Dennis Quaid to a 2-picture deal! All of the Brody roles are re-cast again, except Lorraine Gary returns as Ellen Brody, who's convinced that a great white shark is targeting her family, even tracking her down in the Bahamas...
And Michael Caine is brought in as comic relief, and a potential love interest for the widow Brody. Ellen seems to have vivid memories of shark attacks that look exactly like clips from "Jaws" and "Jaws 2", even though her character wasn't even present during those scenes. She shares this ability with the new shark - who seems to want to eat anyone with the last name Brody, even though it couldn't possibly be the same sharks destroyed in the previous films.
Very little of this movie makes sense - Sean Brody was afraid of the water, but early in the film we see him back in Amity, and taking a boat out to clear driftwood from a buoy. Mike Brody's girlfriend in "Jaws 3" was a dolphin expert named Kathryn, but now he's married to a sculptor named Carla - what happened to Kathryn? I guess in the 4 years between the films he ditched Kathryn, married Carla and somehow they produced a 5-year old daughter...
Let's not even get into the presence of Mario Van Peebles with a horrible Jamaican accent...
You know, I couldn't even tell what killed the shark at the end. The editing was so bad, it seemed like Ellen Brody blew up the shark with her psychic powers, while staring at it. Or somehow Martin Brody shot the shark from her impossible flashback...
Stick a harpoon in this franchise, it's dead in the water...
RATING: 3 out of 10 conch shells
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