The thing about ranking the Jaws movies is that there’s Jaws, and then there’s the rest of them. The gap in quality between Steven Spielberg’s seismic phenomenon of dexterous cinematic intuition versus the sequels that attempted to cash in on its commercial success is so immense it’s laughable—the latter two films of the series are often mocked as some of the worst movies ever made. The first movie spawned an extensive onslaught of cheap imitators and rip-offs, and that includes the films that carried the same name. The franchise is the ultimate example of studios learning all the wrong lessons from a runaway hit.
So why even rank them? Well, even though Jaws obviously stands heads, shoulders and dorsal fins above the others, it’s still interesting to examine just where the other ones went wrong, which of their crimes are easier to shrug off and which are more indefensible, and how they exist within the shadow of one of the greatest American movies ever made. The initial film is a masterpiece of sustained tension, precise character work and extraordinary analog effects, and the fact that any movies under the same banner were made remains a fascinating case study. They have an inverse sort of effect: The more you think about them, the more amazed you are that Spielberg pulled off Jaws in the first place. So maybe they’re worth thinking about.
Here’s every Jaws movie, ranked:
4. Jaws 2 (1978)
At the end of Jaws, Brody (Roy Scheider) blows up the great white shark by stuffing a scuba tank into its mouth and shooting it with a rifle—the biggest moment of the film. Within the first 20 minutes of Jaws 2, the new evil shark causes a lady to douse herself and her small boat with gasoline before trying to shoot the shark with a flare gun, causing the entire vessel to go up in a huge explosion. It’s indicative of the philosophy of this sequel, which tries to recapture the magic that captivated audiences the first time around. In Jaws, less was more. Jaws 2 seems to think that more is more.
To be fair, it likely would have been impossible to extract the same sort of tension from the unseen a second time around, and it’s commendable for a sequel of this type to try a different approach. Though, Jaws 2 doesn’t stray especially far out of the comfort zone already established previously, which is likely why it’s often referred to as the best of the Jaws sequels. It sees Brody (played by a begrudgingly returning Scheider who only agreed to return to get out of another contract with Universal) as well as additional returning extended cast members taking on another great white attacking civilians near Amity Island, with the story splitting time between Brody and his kids with their friends, whom he eventually has to risk life and limb to save from the water in the climax. Between the returning lead star and relatively plausible narrative compared to Jaws 3 and 4, it’s easy to see why people prefer this film to the ones that followed.
But Jaws 2 too often plays as a lukewarm rehash of events the first film did better. Director Jeannot Szwarc (hired in the midst of a troubled production after the firing of initial director John D. Hancock) never gets anywhere within the same stratosphere of Spielberg’s visual cleverness, and his decision to show more of the shark results in some extremely diminished returns and too-obvious seams in the effects work. The best aspects of the film are actually wrapped up in Brody’s psychology, as he’s turned into a traumatized, trigger-happy cop trying to convince city officials and the general populace that they really are under attack once again. He appears to be a man gone mad, even wondering if sharks know when one of their kind is killed and would seek revenge, an idea that would be taken on more literally in Jaws: The Revenge. But as for the rest of this entry, it all rings as much too familiar to sustain any lasting interest, and it’s the one that feels the most directly like a classic money-grab sequel without many of its own ideas or unique identity. To its credit, though, it does have a pretty neat shark death by electrocution.
3. Jaws: The Revenge (1987)
If you’re doing a sequel to a movie as esteemed as Jaws, you may as well get pretty wacky. Jaws 2 derives its lackluster status from being trapped within a strict set of expectations—from being a movie so unmemorable because of how it tries to replicate the broad beats of the much better film that immediately preceded it. By the fourth entry, Jaws: The Revenge, any obligations to such notions are wholeheartedly thrown out to sea as chum to be devoured. It is not a good film, but its outlandish premise, strange characters and bizarre narrative turns make it something hard to forget, and more entertaining than a straight rehash of the material from the first film.
Jaws: The Revenge ignores any extended continuity about the Brody family established in Jaws 3-D. Lorraine Gary reprises her role as Ellen Brody, living as a widow on Amity Island (Martin died of a heart attack). She becomes paranoid that her family is the victim of a shark vendetta when her police deputy son Sean (Mitchell Anderson) is killed by yet another great white. She demands that her other son Michael (Lance Guest) give up his job as a marine biologist, but somehow he convinces her to come with him out to the Bahamas—a place where she is immediately surrounded by water on all sides—as the Brody family continues to experience deadly encounters with a shark that’s got a score to settle.
The Revenge is infamous for its rushed production schedule, moving from being greenlit to a full theatrical release in less than a year, and the final product bears all the hallmarks of its haywire inception. But there’s a manic sort of glee to all of its nonsense, a total mess of bad ideas all splayed out over the course of a sub-90 minute piece of ‘80s creature-feature schlock, which includes the implication that the lead character has some kind of psychic connection with the antagonist shark. Even weirder than that may be Mario Van Peebles’ completely goofy fake Jamaican accent, as well as Michael Caine mysteriously being in the film as Ellen’s love interest with a penchant for telling extended anecdotes and offering up little nuggets of old-man wisdom.
2. Jaws 3-D (1983)
Jaws 3-D earns its place as the best Jaws sequel by incorporating a few genuinely inspired pieces of cheap B-movie thrills within its ludicrous plot. It’s a movie that feels like it couldn’t be made within today’s reality of air-tight brand preservation, the plot revolving around a SeaWorld theme park under attack by not just one, but two sharks—somehow the third film of the franchise is actually the one to pull the “there’s actually two of them!” twist. The plot is propelled forward by a confluence of perspectives from the members of the staff—led by an allegedly coked-out Dennis Quaid as Martin Brody’s son Michael, who is an engineer at the park—of what to do about a baby great white that has made its way into their waters, none of them humane. Everyone wants to kill the creature live on air, or hold it in captivity so SeaWorld can be the first park to house such an animal. No one suggests simply capturing the thing to set it loose back out in the wild. After they capture it and the much larger mother shark that’s also in the park begins to attack, it can only read as nature asserting its dominance in a narrative that seems strikingly anti-SeaWorld for something they presumably signed off on.
Such a progressive perspective can’t hold through to the end of the movie: The shark is ultimately defeated as Michael and his girlfriend Kathryn (Bess Armstrong) freeze-frame with their dolphin friends that helped them kill the bad sea creature before the credits roll. The heroes at SeaWorld have saved the day. Still, the amount of peril, terror and violent ends that characters experience within the confines of this very real amusement park brand within the film is kind of surreal. The script even makes up a non-existent attraction to use as a set-piece: A network of underwater tunnels that a whole slew of extras nearly drown within when the shark causes major damage to the infrastructure as it hunts for fresh meat.
This is to say nothing of the ultra-gimmicky 3D effects that, as seen in 2D 40 years later, render the film a cultural artifact that’s inseparable from the 3D boom of the ‘80s, in a way that’s uniquely endearing. In spite of everything genuinely wrong with this movie—the characters are admittedly quite dull and you have to meet this entire endeavor on its own terms—it does have some of the more inspired deaths and gore that you’ll find across the span of all four films. Notable is a surprisingly grisly corpse prosthetic that gets an extended close-up, a legitimately scary scene that sees a character actively try and fail to escape while inside the mouth of the shark, and the shark dying from an internal explosion via a grenade that was lodged in its throat. In some ways, Jaws 3-D is genuinely surprising, and in the Jaws franchise, that’s not nothing.
1. Jaws (1975)
Is Jaws a horror film? For those who worry that it’s “not safe to go back in the water,” then most certainly it is. But regardless of how you’d classify it, there’s no denying that Jaws is anything but brilliant, one of Spielberg’s great populist triumphs, alongside the likes of Jurassic Park and E.T., but leaner and less polished than either. Much has been made over the years of how Jaws as a film really benefits from the technical issues that plagued its making; the story originally called for more scenes featuring the mechanical shark “Bruce,” but the constantly malfunctioning animatronic forced the director to cut back, which ended up maximizing each appearance’s impact. The first time that Brody (Roy Scheider) sees the literal “jaws” of the beast while absentmindedly throwing chum into the water is one of the great, scream-inducing moments in cinema history, and it’s a shock that has rarely been matched in any other shark movie since. Likewise with the death of Quint (Robert Shaw), whose mad scramble to avoid those gnashing teeth is the kind of thing that created its very own sub-genre of children’s nightmares. Ultimately, Jaws is a great film via memorable characters, but a scary film care of novelty and perfect execution. —Jim Vorel