Jaws 4: The Revenge

I would pay a thousand dollars to read Aristotle's review of this movie. A shark supernaturally motivated to seek revenge on the family that killed its ancestors? The premise is practically Greek anyway. It's like Aeschylus but with sharks instead of Furies.

So, on one hand, the movie is a priori retarded. I mean, it's the fourth installment in this franchise, and after the Sea World escapade from Jaws 3, which is more like Antonioni's Blow-Up than I ever want to think about, what, really, can the producers do but move the whole shebang to the Bahamas, hire Mario van Peebles to cruise around in a boat, and sprinkle in some pirate lore. Relocating to the Caribbean mercifully rids the plot of WASPy Amity Island, which, as far as I can tell, for twelve long years deprived Jaws of some sorely desired dark meat. Further south, the big, hungry beast enjoys a jerkier variety of humankind.

But on the other hand, unlike Jaws 3, which deliberately spoofed its own genre, exchanging high horror for camp--clever strategy, given the film's obvious and abundant limitations--Jaws 4: The Revenge, though undoubtedly the most preposterous of the four movies, makes the fatal mistake of trying to challenge the first, serious Jaws on its own terms. It therefore wastes a golden opportunity to exploit the revenge narrative, which is begging, screaming not to be taken seriously, for all its lively, drag-queen-on-parade tackiness. Think about it. A shark stalks the wife of the man who exploded its great-grandfather? Seriously, stalks. It follows her from New England to the Bahamas. And the director, Joseph Sargent, chooses thrills and mystique over, well, anything that doesn't assume sharks can stalk people.

It should have been a musical like Troy McClure's Broadway Planet of the Apes from The Simpsons. If they ever make a Jaws 5, it better be in Claymation, or spoken entirely in jive inside the shark's mind (I can help with this), or staged as an early nineteenth century comedy of manners a la Jane Austen--where people resist one another's advances in a delightful series of trysts and entanglements, only to marry and live life happily and wisely, and get eaten by sharks--or the motherfucker best be set at the center of the Earth. F

Slothrop: Sounds more like a D - if only because Jaws number four is a fish and fishes are tremendously awesome, no matter whom they stalk.

Koko: The shark gets an F too, because in Jaws 4 he gets his silly fishhead electrocuted by a flashlight.