Time to dive once again into the churning waters of the Jaws series for the final installment. This is the one that is supposed to be the worst, according to the scuttlebutt that I have heard. Rather than the shark simply being a vicious, killing machine without remorse; now it is also possessed of a terrible vengeance that it needs to enact upon the Brody family.

We pick up some time after the last movie left off but there’s no real certainty if this movie is working with the 3-D timeline. Sean and Michael Brody have different actors from the third film but the mother is still the same and dad died of a heart attack off screen. Sean is now a deputy on Amity Island, following in his Dad’s footsteps, with no mention of Kelly from previous movie. Michael is married with a kid but now he’s trying to get his marine biology PhD and his wife is an artist instead of the marine biologist he was with at the end of the last one. Messed up timeline or no, we start off with Sean immediately getting killed by a shark around Christmas time. Michael convinces his mom to come to the Bahamas with him where it’s too warm for sharks but it turns out the shark just follows them there because it has Brody-sense.

Outside of the fact that there is a shark that is pissed off about the death of other sharks at the hands of the Brody family; I’m not really sure why everyone hates on this specific entry in the Jaws franchise. If anything, the shitty 3-D and Sea World tie in might make the third one the weakest. We get Mario Van Peebles doing his best shitty Islander accent. Michael Caine does his best to phone in his performance as a pilot with a gambling problem that is seducing the widow Brody. When Michael finds a great white shark randomly in waters that should be too warm and after his brother was killed by a great white and he has been attacked on no less than 2 occasions by them; his instinct is to not tell his mother because it might upset her. Shit, I would be upset. Take the hint, my dude. The ocean hates you and you should move to Kansas.

The shark effects are probably the best they’ve been but that might just be the fact that I just watched Deep Blue Sea and it has the dumbest looking CGI sharks. The stakes feel much lower this time since the shark is acting as a spirit of vengeance on one family instead of terrorizing an entire beach community or amusement park. I think that would have played a little better if somehow the shark from any of the previous movies had managed to live and was seeking revenge but it’s more like a shark contract killer has been hired on the family. Due to all of the movies following around one family, I kind of wonder about the Jaws 19 movie in Back to the Future 2. Is it still the Brodys? Is it after Michael’s daughter or did she have a kid and now it’s after them?

In all, this is about as watchable as any other Jaws sequel. I’d give it a 2.5 out of 5 and say that if you watched all the other ones, you might as well watch this one too.