Reviews by Steven Scheuer
Jaws 2
The thrills are still there, but the humor and theatrical flair that made Jaws so much fun are gone. In an obvious grab for the teenage audience, the writers send a lot of kids out on the water in sailboats; their bickering and jiving makes the movie trivial and homey, like a wilderness adventure picture. Left all alone to fight the shark, Roy Scheider gives a warm, large-scale performance, but this time the shark's really just an eating machine (although it's hard to see how even a machine could digest so many meals in so short a time).
Jaws 3-D
A thirty-five-foot great white shark invades the equivalent of Florida's Seaworld and inconveniences a few tourists; the result is as thudding and prosaic as the Airport pictures. We wait for the sea park to open; we watch Lou Gossett Jr. as its designer, impersonate an oak tree; we ogle Bess Armstrong as she rides around on the backs of porpoises in a wet suit. Finally, after ninety minutes, the shark arrives and director Joe Alves delivers the "thrills": random, generic glimpses of a shark fin sliding through the water, with an occasional gnawed-off limb shoved into our faces via the surprisingly shoddy 3-D process (which doesn't work when you're watching this on your TV).