A now-adult Mike Brody (Dennis Quaid) works at a marine park owned by Calvin Bouchard (Louis Gossett Jr).
His past comes back to haunt him when a shark is discovered inside the park.
It gets worse when the park’s employees realize that there is more than one set of Jaws inside the park…
As with Jaws 2, the third Jaws entry is haunted by the shadow of what could have been:
During the initial stages of pre-production, the premise was to do a spoof about the making of a Jaws sequel, entitled Jaws 3 People 0 - the script was co-written by John Hughes, with Joe Dante briefly in the frame to direct.
Sadly, that scenario was scrapped.
The final script bears the names of RIchard Matheson and original scribe Carl Gottlieb, but it is hard to detect their touch.
Director Joe Alves gets a lot of the flack, but I think his work deserves some serious qualifications - he was the production designer on the first movie, and was second-unit director on the second, the film was his debut, and he would to work with 3D technology - the same technology which bedeviled the makers of third Friday the 13th movie.
So he was not the best person to direct a Jaws movie, but he also had to deal with other factors which probably would have made the job almost impossible for any seasoned director.
All that being said, Jaws 3 is bad.
It oscillates between blandly shot surface scenes and incomprehensible action set pieces. The pacing is funereal. The effects suffer from sloppy compositing, and the actors have little to work with (the one bright spot is Louis Gossett Jr as the owner of the park).
While the shark was sparsely used in the first movie, when it counted the filmmakers would stage the action so the performers and the shark were in the same frame.
For the most part the filmmakers focus on intercutting shots of the shark (either shots of a real shark or Bruce), with shots of the characters it is chasing/eating.
This would be passable if the shot selection created a sense of basic geography, but it is often impossible to work out where a character is or what they are even doing.
It is a pity because the basic building blocks of Jaws 3 could serve as a fun monster movie. The film even begins to bleed into other genres, becoming more of a disaster movie when a group of tourists are trapped in an underwater compartment.
As with everything in Jaws 3, the third act - our heroes trying to kill the shark before the tourists die - could have been fun. But these set pieces are ruined by the films’ lack of basic understanding of film grammar.
Spoilers for my next review, but Jaws 3 is the worst of the Jaws movies. In a sort of cinematic justice, this film’s premise would be executed in a more successful fashion by Jaws’s director Steven Spielberg in Jurassic Park, released a decade later.
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