Overall Rating
  Awesome: 2.78%
Worth A Look: 7.41%
Average: 17.59%
Pretty Bad: 12.04%
Total Crap: 60.19%
3 reviews, 90 user ratings
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| Jaws 3-D |
by Scott Weinberg
"Try to mention this movie to someone while keeping a straight face."
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Ah, the early eighties. Back then, some genius thought that 3-D needed to make a comeback. Amityville 3-D, Friday the 13th Part 3-D, Demi Moore in Parasite in 3-D! Find me a more vast wasteland of cinematic swill than the early eighties 3-D revival. Treasures of the Four Crowns, Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, and the aptly titled Comin' At Ya! All in 3-D and I saw every single one. Yep, going to the movies was pretty damn scary back in 1983.When you're pushing out yet another sequel to a movie that was never even meant to have one, you better find a way to make your movie something different. It has to somehow gel with the two prior movies, and still distinguish itself from the series at the same time. Like the bittersweet closure offered in Return of the Jedi or the interesting new directions taken as in Back to the Future 3 or Police Academy 3: Back in Training. So by a sequel 'distinguishing itself', it's safe to assume I'm not talking about making a switch to 3-D!
Universal wants a new Jaws movie at the same time 3-D is all of a sudden back in style. You do the math. For a director, they insisted on the best. They got someone named Joe Alves. Heck - Joe had been a production designer for both Jaws AND Jaws 2! This would be his first directorial effort, and curiously enough his last. They also needed a solid screenwriter. They got a guy called Carl Gottlieb. Carl had co-written Jaws 2 and also wrote the screenplay for Caveman, which consisted solely of grunts and nonsensical babble-words. Surely this guy could write Jaws 3-D. By the way, Carl hasn't written a script since Jaws 3-D.
They needed actors.. They got Dennis Quaid, who was obviosuly too young to say no to a movie with the phrase "3-D" in the title. (Dennis would star in The Right Stuff later the same year, and would always refer to this movie as "Jaws what? Aw, I was drunk.") Bess Armstrong plays his girlfriend, and she's as bland here as she was with Tom Selleck in High Road to China and as dull as she was with Tom Hanks in Nothing in Common.
Lou Gossett Jr. is on hand, but we are talking about 1983. He was in everything. Heck, he was on hand for all FOUR Iron Eagle movies. Let's say just say he was not picky about his scripts. A young and cute Lea Thompson shows up for a bit, and I've always had a little crush on Lea, from movies like Some Kind of Wonderful and Red Dawn, so I'll lay off. Heck - It was her first movie! Plus she was in Howard the Duck, so I assume her life has been difficult enough.
We all know how the original Jaws went: Shark shows up in a populated area and the result was one of the most entertaining movies ever made. When they churned out the first sequel, they tried (somewhat successfully) to erase the whole concept of the incredible coincidence of the whole "shark" situation. Jaws 2 is a pretty silly movie and of course doesn't hold a candle to the original, but I can easily recommend that movie as mindless fun.
But Jaws 3.
It's just awful. This time, there's a shark trapped somewhere in a Sea World park, and the shoddy script attempts to extract some suspense from that. Considering that people don't really swim in parks like these, the whole concept of scaring the average moviegoer is pretty much ruined from the word Go. To be completely fair, there is an ample amount of carnage, as when the shark attacks a bunch of water-skiing pyramid-girls, before turning his sights on a group of toddlers frolicking in the shallow end.This movie introduced the concept of a shark 'getting even' with man. It also introduced 3-D shots of fake looking sharks in your face and also dismembered arms floating right into your popcorn. Fun. At least we can be grateful to movies like this one, since it's a safe bet we won't see another 3-D resurgence for at least another 25 years. I hope.
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=2300&reviewer=128
originally posted: 10/14/00 09:44:31
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USA
22-Jul-1983 (PG)
UK
N/A
Australia
22-Jul-1983 (MA)
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