Sadly Over-hyped

Pretty Good

Overrated and overhyped

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

When Hollywood decides to make a sequel, it doesn't try to lose money in the deal. Yet, many times the moguls are wrong and sequels don't fare well at the box office. Once in a while they have a big hit. More times than either of these, the sequels will fare well, or good enough at the box office, even though they may be far inferior films. And sometimes, a sequel will be terrible and still do well with audiences. That's okay with the movers and shakers in tinsel town because making money is mostly what making movies is all about. "Jaws 3-D" is in that category of quite bad sequels that nevertheless did quite well at the box office. It may not be too surprising, considering the subject matter and the enduring aura from the original film, just eight years earlier. And, to some extent, considering some intrigue and enjoyment from "Jaws 2" in 1978. Maybe the 3-D angle was the biggest push for making a second sequel. But this film fails in all aspects except a couple of scenes with the shark. If that were the only reason for watching this film, and the rest of the script could be trashed, it might score a 5. But the acting by everyone in this cast is horrible. It ranges from the melodramatic to the infantile to the forced and amateurish. The script is terrible. The idea for the plot is okay, but the screenplay just doesn't build an aura of suspense and worry about where the beast will strike or appear. Enough said. This is a very forgettable film. As bad as this one is for intrigue, characters and acting, Hollywood yet did one more - looking at the box office from this one. But "Jaws 4" in 1987 did not recover its budget in the U.S. and just earned a little worldwide. That probably put an end to the efforts to try to capitalize on a singular fantastic fright movie from 1973. Many of us who enjoyed the original scary thriller are happy that Hollywood finally has had its fill of great white sharks. How about a giant octopus movie? It's been a few decades since the sci-fi folks at Hollywood made one of those.Here's the only humorous line in the movie. Mike Brody (Dennis Quaid) says to Dr. Kay Morgan (Bess Armstrong), "All right. I'll have my beeper beep your beeper."

Seeing Jaws 3-D makes me wonder if I was too harsh on Jaws 2. I recently reviewed Jaws 2 and criticized its sloppy and poor storytelling and pacing, but nonetheless thought it had moments of good film-making, especially in its action set-pieces - so you had a decent, albeit not exceptional movie. Well, the third Jaws movie makes Jaws 2 look like Jaws. Jaws 3-D is a movie that, to my astonishment, makes me feel nothing. Well almost nothing. The only emotion that stirred inside me during its entire one hour and forty minutes... was embarrassment for this "amateur hour." I was mildly interested in seeing the movie because it seemed to be the last Jaws movie with the crew of the previous movies working on it. Longtime Spielberg production designer Joe Alves directed, as he was a second unit director on the previous movies and played a part in getting them to look good. Jaws 3-D was also the last Jaws screenplay penned by Carl Gottlieb. Gottlieb, who contributed to the screenplay of Jaws and largely wrote Jaws 2, had shown some competency in staging suspenseful scenes and allowing moments for characters to breathe and develop. I am not sure if they were under strain from studio executives, but it is clear watching Jaws 3-D why Alves never directed again, and why Gottlieb's writing career more or less fizzled out after this movie. Characters, such as the two Brody sons, have little character and less to do. There's no meaningful exchanges between the brothers or other Sea World workers, or the park owner (an enjoyably slimy performance by Lou Gosset), or the Australian... hunter? photographer? Even Jaws 2 managed to have moments where people acted (even if that was rare). Here everyone goes through the motions. Dennis Quaid gets his paycheck. Sean Brody, played indistinctly by John Putch, has a... uh, character arc where he's afraid of the water, but gets over it because a hot chick offers to bang him by the beach. I guess that's character development. But he leaves the movie two-thirds of the way through, severing one more connection with the series' cast and history that we have grown attached to. Now, I am always for movies, especially genre/franchise flicks bucking convention and cleverly moving past their forebears, but without good writing or characters, all those efforts are worthless. Jaws 2 didn't have a particularly strong script, so it leaned on the setting of Amity Island, and some familiar faces to make up the deficit. Jaws 3-D thought it could lean on the setting of Sea World and the presence of other sea creatures like dolphins, orca, and the like. The outcome is a total dud, and cynical misjudge of what will keep the audience engaged. The setting is totally wasted - see Deep Blue Sea to see a film that at least tries to take advantage of its location in an underwater observatory. Making an amusement park the site of widespread bloodshed and chaos has immediate potential (see: Jurassic Park), but Universal did not seem to want to spend the money fleshing the premise out, so what is left is a real cheap production: extending from the sets all the way to the marquis attraction - the shark itself.The shark has never looked so bad. Jaws 2 showed off a shark that was in some ways superior to the original, and the resultant construction allowed for some inventive and fun action scenes from the director and crew. In Jaws 3-D the shark was stiff, mostly motionless, and seemed to have consisted of a single model that was capable of opening its mouth and wiggling a little bit. The action scenes were mundane and executed in a dull manner and lacked the dynamic camera movements and smart cuts of the previous movie. Instead, we have "fin chases something in the water" scenes, mixed with some laughable "shark-torpedo" moments where the shark slowly inches towards something to attack. The film's other effects are likewise poor. The optical shots and overlays were so so shoddy that you wonder how anyone signed off on them, other than slimy producers looking for a quick buck. They say that while making Jaws Spielberg called the SFX crew the "special defects department." He had no clue how good he had it. Here's a rule for creature movies. If you can't show the monster all the time, at least have a good writing/actors. If you can't have good writing/characters, than at least keep the thing short and moving so my time isn't wasted. Jaws 3-D wastes your time and feels longer than its 1hr40min length because it lacks a good monster, good performances or writing, and has a terminally slow pace riddled with filler. Jaws 2 had me pining for more shark scenes. When compared to Jaws 3-D, Jaws 2 feels like non-stop shark tail slapping you in your groin. The movie tries to pull of some cheap jump-scares and gross-outs, but the make-up and special effects are c-movie grade and incredibly silly. Worse still, they are spread out so far and few that they are less like exclamation points than they are a dull rapping on the TV screen to make sure you are still awake. Is there anything positive about Jaws 3-D? Surprisingly, yes! The music, composed by Alan Parker is fun, adventurous, and well-suited to the action. While leaning on the score of John Williams, it nonetheless manages to achieve its own sound and feels fresh and enjoyable. Mr. Parker deserves a commendation for doing the best he could with a bad source. It's a shame he seemed to retreat largely into made-for-TV movies after this, never getting a huge Hollywood movie to sink his teeth into again.In summation: this movie definitely feels like the death-knell for this "franchise." There wasn't even enough happening to offer a "so bad it's good" experience! Despite having a few of the original hands working on it, the movie demonstrated that they lacked the skill, the time, or the artistic freedom to bring about something worthwhile. I'll give it to the crew of Jaws 2: they tried to make a good movie, they just didn't really succeed. The makers of Jaws 3-D didn't even try!

Roger Ebert wasn't known for his political views, but he did have thoughts on the film industry. I guess you could consider views on the actual movie industry to be political ones. They include stuff about censorship, special effects, etc. I will always remember at how he was against 3-D. He kept making article after article about how he was tired of it. 1983 saw a resurfacing of 3D that came from the 1950's. There were many third installments in series that were 3D and this is one of the worst. It's pretty easy to see that this was just a cheap gimmick and you can comprehend how it died off in this decade.But I'm digressing. This is the third "Jaws" movie and it's fascinating for me to watch these films in chronological order if only because of how massively they declined with each installment. At first, I thought this didn't have any connections to the previous films, but I was wrong. The main characters are the Brody brothers, the sons of the main lead from the other films. It's still a loose connection. I literally fell asleep watching this movie as it was so boring. Okay, that was probably only because I stayed up for New Year's Eve and got little sleep, but still it was boring. Even for a 98 minute film, it seemed too long. Everything was padded.The worst thing was of course how bad the special effects were. I mean, I even tried to use some old 3-D glasses I had around and they didn't work. Everything is horribly stilted here. I have never seen any film that has images that so blatantly try to just stick out to the audience. The coloring effects are terrible. I can blatantly see an error with the submarine as part of it visibly vanishes through a bad special effect. The shark models look terrible too. It is literally the worst use of 3-D I have ever seen in any film. I couldn't find Ebert's review of it, but it might have had a profound effect on him. Skip this. *1/2

By now the series had descended into laughability, something at a high with this cheesy 3D take on the killer shark theme made to cash in on the short-lived 3D craze of the early '80s. Immediately we're bombarded with those blocky yellow titles that fly out of the screen and get to watch lots of things fly out at us throughout the film's course. Objects include jets of water, a harpoon, the inevitable shark and my favourite, a cheesy severed arm which lingers on the screen for minutes. None of these are as much fun as they were in, say, Friday the 13th Part III. All of these effects are made hilarious by the bad special effects, which are so unrealistic that it looks like little, if any of the film was actually filmed underwater at all! The link with the previous films is so tenuous that you have to wonder just why they bothered at all to associate it with them - surely a clean break would have been a better bet? This time Dennis Quaid plays the far too-young hero, and it's hard to believe that he went on to quite a successful career after his bad performance here. At least he isn't alone, as just about all of the cast are stupid and unconvincing in this film - with the possible exception of an under-used Louis Gossett Jr, who is pretty cool as the chief of the theme park who has to face up to the consequences of his playing with nature.The people are a clichéd bunch as per usual - there's the clean-cut girl, the "risky" younger brother who gets himself in trouble, two imported British actors as a pair of hunters who plan to trap the shark, plus loads of forgettable youngsters who fade from the memory the instant the film finishes. The plot is merely a string of clichés, and you can pretty much guarantee that what you see here has been done before - there's even a group of people being trapped in one location with time running out, a disaster movie staple if ever there was one. The rubber shark is overused here too, making it unrealistic and in places ludicrous.The whole idea of a complex being attacked by sharks is done a lot better in the recent hit thriller DEEP BLUE SEA, which at least doesn't take itself too seriously and remains frequently exciting. Exciting is about as far as you can get from JAWS 3, which also totally fails to build up any suspense that its predecessors sustained - here, at the climax, you just think "that's it?" instead of sitting back in satisfaction with the previous two films. You may think that the idea of a mother shark coming back to avenge the death of her young is a clever one, but go back twenty-three years previously and you'll notice it was already done in GORGO anyway.But perhaps I'm being too harsh. Whilst bad, JAWS 3 isn't quite the worst film ever made. Some scenes are cool - I loved the close-up of the slimy, worm-infested mutilated head we see in one instance, which undoubtedly helped to earn this film a 15 certificate. It's also watchable on a schlocky level, and sometimes reaches the level of bad '70s disaster flicks like METEOR and others. The best I can say about this film is that it's rarely boring (only at the beginning, which takes half an hour to start). You may think that things couldn't get worse after this, but JAWS: THE REVENGE followed four years later...