Oh hi, Jaws 3-D!
The Jaws franchise really never should have been a franchise. Jaws 2 was basically Jaws 1 without any of the entertainment and Jaws 4 is… well I’ll save that for a later article. In between those two was Jaws 3-D. Part of the many 3D crazes that have swept the movie industry over the years, Jaws 3-D was also one of the many movies that thought it was clever to have the third installment in 3D. Jaws 3-D is a horrible mess of a movie with random characters who do nothing, dolphins, worthless callbacks, and a literal breaking of the fourth wall.
The movie begins with the shark eating a fish. Yes, this is what the Jaws series has sunk to by the third film. Jaws is eating a fairly small fish. This fish’s head then slowly moves towards the camera. I decided to go back and see exactly how long it takes the fish’s head to move at the camera from its first appearance, the results: 24 seconds. 24 seconds of a decapitated fish head moving towards the screen. This scene’s powerfully moving imagery is probably what inspired James Cameron to make Avatar.
After this, we have a lot of people not get eaten by Jaws. It gets close to eating someone but then apparently she changes her mind and leaves them alone. 
Eventually, Jaws follows some water skiers into the primary location of the movie: Sea World. I’m not entirely sure why Sea World would agree to being featured in this movie. It’s kind of like the pope guest starring in a movie about pedophilic priests; it’s just a bad PR move.
Inside Sea World, the situation is grim, the dolphins are scared of something and they’re not sure what. So some guy decides to secure the gates around the dolphin area. At night. Surprise! He gets eaten and his arm starts floating at the screen. His arm only floats at us for 7 seconds, apparently a decapitated fish is more important than a dead guy. The next day, the people who I think are supposed to be our protagonists hang out at a bar and do really stupid things. 
I say I think they’re supposed to be our protagonists because none of them really do anything, they have no real character, and I couldn’t remember any of their names. Turns out that the sons of Brody from the first two movies are all grown up and one of them works at Sea World. The other one has a crippling fear of the ocean apparently, but all it takes is his new female love interest stripping down a bit to make him go out and do it in the ocean water. He is interrupted by his brother and his girlfriend who play a really stupid prank and pretend to be security guards. Before and during all of this we have bad scenes of awkward flirting, bizarre bar and beach games, and lies about undone flies.
After the awkward flirtations are over, we see coral rustlers out on the water. They are very quickly eaten by Jaws, who apparently wants to lay low and eats their inflatable raft too. We unfortunately do not see someones eyeballs or other body parts slowly move towards the screen at this time.
The next day, the wife of the now armless and lifeless maintenance man is angry that her husband is not home. So she starts yelling at the cooler Brody kid who works at Sea World about how worthless her husband is. Brody’s girlfriend diffuses the situation by walking up, putting her arm around both of them and saying “Hi darlin’ what’s wrong?” Brody and girlfriend decide to check the waters in case he died. The guy’s wife never seems remotely concerned about his wellbeing during this exchange.
Brody and friends climb into a yellow submarine and go in front of the badly green-screened water. It kind of looks like something I poorly photoshopped. They decide to go check out the standard fishbowl prop: the sunken ship. The movie then spends 20 seconds staring at a prop skeleton whose hands move toward the screen. As the crew looks around the sunken ship, a large shark hand-puppet attacks! Thankfully, the dolphins are there to save them by having Brody and his girlfriend grab on as they swim to safety.
Once there, they alert their boss and several plans are formed. A douchebag British guy suggests killing the shark and filming it because it’d be so totally awesome. Meanwhile Brody’s girlfriend wants to capture it alive so they can parade it around. Ultimately it is decided that they capture the shark. They go into the water with tranqs and actually catch it and bring it into captivity. Unfortunately, the hubris of the park director proves too much as he moves it to a sweet new tank to show it off and it immediately dies.
The shark’s mom is pissed and decides to go on a killing spree as revenge, for you see, she was the evil shark all along. Meanwhile in an underwater tunnel of horror or something, a little girl sees the rest of the maintenance guy and people start panicking. As the bad news is delivered to the director in the underwater situation room/lounge he is skeptical until the shark decides to swim up to the room and say hello. Unfortunately she doesn’t do anything cool like break the glass and eat them all and instead just swims away.
Meanwhile, the other, lamer Brody brother has been hanging out with his new girlfriend on the bumper boats when the shark attacks! By attack, I mean she sort of playfully nibbles on the girlfriend. She doesn’t even lose a limb. This leads to a several minute scene of cool-Brody running around like an idiot yelling incomprehensibly about getting everyone out of the water. During this scene, the shark swims alongside motorboats. It’s just that cool.
More people continue to not get eaten until the shark teleports to the underwater tunnel of horror and attacks it. This causes it to leak water everywhere and everyone starts running to the saferoom. Nothing says “our amusement park aquarium thing is fun” quite like having it be destroyed in a movie.
This is a safe place I should visit with my children.
A press conference is held and then douchey british guy decides he’s going to try to lure the shark into a different area so they can fix the tunnel. He does this by jumping in the water with his cameraman, spilling vials of blood around, and sitting there waiting to snap a shot. Between scenes his cameraman needed a smoke or something, because when we cut back, douchey British guy is by himself and is quickly eaten when poking the shark with a stick fails to scare it off. Except he gets stuck in the shark’s throat or something and we see it from his point of view for a little bit.
Things get welded, trapped people are saved, and everyone’s chilling in the underwater control deck celebrating a job well done. Suddenly….
The shark starts FLOATING TOWARDS THEM!
Yeeeeup, she kind of just floats at them.
It is at this point that the characters scream in slow-motion. I’m not kidding.
She doesn’t ever move her body until the end when she…
BREAKS THE FOURTH WALL GLASS!
The shark then eats 50% of the movie’s black characters before the cool Brody kid notices something.
Yes, one of the grenades the douchey British guy apparently had earlier is still in his hand. Which is still in the front of the shark’s mouth because of deus ex machina. Brody pulls the pin and the shark explodes.
Brody and his girlfriend emerge in the ocean, happy to be alive. Then, the girlfriend asks a very important question: “What happened to the dolphins?” She does not question the fate of the other 50% of the movie’s black cast or anyone else in the control room, she needs to know about the dolphins. The movie then ends on this freeze frame:
I would say something more about the ending, but I think that about sums it up. It’s quite interesting to see a 3D movie in 2D, because you get entire scenes of really awkward pauses on objects just so they can not pop out of the screen at you. Also I would really like to know what SeaWorld was thinking. I cannot see how this movie would make people want to go there.
Overall though, it was a fun movie. The plot made no sense, the characters barely existed and the special effects were terrible. In other words, perfect so bad its good material. I cannot give it a full thumbs-up bro-fist though, as the movie never has any moment quite amazing enough to justify that. It’s still worth a watch though, and now that its on Netflix Instant Streaming you can watch it quite easily.
Thumbs-up out of thumbs-up bro-fist
Watch it.
