Jaws Franchise Ranked
It’s the middle of summer so it seemed like the perfect time to rank one of the ultimate summer franchises, the Jaws franchise. Yes, this is a franchise with four movies. Let’s get started!
NOTE: As a point of reference I watched all of these movies for the first time within the last month. So that is my perspective going into this ranking, a one time watch for all of these movies.
4. Jaws: The Revenge: Going into this I knew something would be pretty FISHY because of the title. This movie tries to be so bad it’s good but it’s just so bad…it’s bad, there’s no other way around it. This movie is about a shark getting revenge on the wife of the main character of the first two movies for killing another shark. It’s a revenge movie…starring a shark hince the title of the movie. The tagline of this movie is “this time it’s personal” (head slap). And they even have this idea of the main character having this physical connection to the shark and predicting where the shark is going to be. And the shark follows her and her family from New Hampshire down to the Bahamas. And the worst part of all of it is they got Michael Caine to be in this movie, and you are thinking to yourself “you are so much better than this. Why are you in this movie?”. And I’m not the only one that has this opinion, the movie has a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes sounds like the critics really took a BITE out of this.
3. Jaws 3D: This is a movie that takes the franchise in a very different direction with going much more in the campier and goofy direction. Where you have a shark escapes SeaWorld and causes havoc that way. So in a lot of ways a prototype for Jurassic World that came many many years later. The cast here is fun. You have Dennis Quaid and Lea Thompson in a pre-Back to the Future part of her career. But this movie is marketed as being in 3D and the 3D effects look terrible, the way they make the movie look 3D is really cheap and feels very much like an 80s movie trying to do 3D effects. Plus I just didn’t find any of these characters to be as interesting as the ones in the first two movies, they didn’t pop and none of them had anything about them that stood out to me. So while it’s more entertaining than Jaws 2, Jaws 2 just had more to offer. The tone was very similar to the original movie. So this movie isn’t bad, I didn’t hate this movie but it is a movie that feels pointless.
2. Jaws 2: A sequel that feels like it only exists just so Universal could make another boatload of money, and for the cast and crew to get a paycheck. It’s a sequel that follows the template of the original movie. It repeats a bunch of plot beats from that movie, where once again the mayor doesn’t believe Brody the shark expert. The characters here aren’t as interesting as they were in the original movie. What made Brody an interesting character was him being with Quint and Hooper so removing them just loses a bunch of the magic. Brody isn’t as interesting on his own in my opinion. And I think with Spielberg not being involved with this movie really hurts it, it doesn’t not have that same magic that Spielberg brought to that original movie. On the positive, John Williams returned to do the score for this movie and it’s great. Roy Schrider is a good actor and is good as Brody, the problem with the character isn’t him. The way he was used in the movie wasn’t good. But Roy did the best with what he was given. This is a movie that is a significant drop in quality from the original movie. It’s not bad but it’s in that mediocre and forgettable middle that several sequels fall into.
1. Jaws: Really? Did you expect anything else to be number 1? This is a movie that has so many great things to offer and as Steven Spielberg’s first big budget movie is pretty fantastic. Right off the bat with this movie you have to talk about the score by John Williams. And it’s one of those scores that whether you’ve seen this movie or not you’ve heard this score and know this score really really well. And the main theme only really plays when the shark is nearby so whenever you hear it you are constantly wondering where the shark is and who he is going to attack. It just builds this sense of tension and dread all through-out the movie. It also just has this great sense of balanced characters Brody, Hooper, and Quint bring a different area of expertise to their mission and so each of them has a different personality to them. Roy Schrider, Richard Dreyfuss, and Robert Shaw are great as these characters. So this is a movie that I went into hearing from everybody that it’s a fantastic thriller that is one of Spielberg’s best and that is the truth. So easily, without question there is no competition in my mind that Jaws, the original movie, is number 1.
There you have it, my ranking of the 4 Jaws movies. I bet I can guess which one you have at number 1. But what is your ranking? Thanks for reading!
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