Blazehgehg

Watching this movie is like trudging through the mud. I very nearly fell asleep while watching it. This is, apparently, a Redbox Original movie, and it plays like something you scraped off the bottom of the dollar DVD bin.

There's just, like, a feeling those movies have, you know? Every pitch is a softball. There's special effects, but they're cheap. A large percentage of the actors are nobody you've ever heard of, with a small handful of big names to carry the movie. The script gets to use the crutch of being adapted from real events, which means it can skip worrying about things like "themes", "pacing" and "character arcs".

It's also a movie of peaks and valleys. Long, long valleys. Every now and then you get a decent practical effect (like the boat sinking) or a weirdly heartfelt moment, buried between stock footage of sharks and CGI that looks like it came from a 2006 Discovery Channel Shark Week promo.

And just when you think the movie's over, it goes for another 15 minutes. And when you think it's over again, it goes for yet another 15 minutes.

I'm sure these were important men and the credits make it very clear they had families and loved ones, but as a movie, this was still a slog.

This is SUCH a sequel. Surprise! The shark is back! Brody (Roy Schneider) is still scared of the shark!

How does Brody's son react?

"Jeeze, dad, I know you narrowly escaped a fatal attack with a serial killer shark last year, but calm down."

How does the Mayor react?

"I'm not shutting anything else down just because when you warned me about a shark last time, it ended up being true, and a dozen people died."

And so we go back through the song and dance: Brody squints at the shoreline, incites panic over false alarms, the mayor gets all worked up and pleads with Brody to calm down. Things escalate and people continue to put themselves into danger as the shark feasts. Textbook stuff. You see every move Jaws 2 is going to make a mile in advance.

Being predictable does not necessarily mean it's automatically a bad movie. In general, Jaws 2 is fine, actually. It's a pretty standard animal attack movie, but it gets to lean on having John Williams reprise composer duties, and even that by itself elevates this movie up a whole point.

The main issue is the final act, when it focuses on a group of teens adrift amidst an attack by the shark. For some of these kids, this is undoubtedly one of their first (and possibly last) acting gigs. And when they get the spotlight, they over-act like their lives depended on it.

None of it ever made me regret starting the movie, though. It's fine. Really.

This is basically John McClane versus a James Bond villain. The scale of the operation here borderlines on being pretty silly, as our "Simon" literally employs an army to help him pull off one of the biggest revenge-heists ever conceived.

The action gets pretty silly, too, as Die Hard 3 goes bigger, bigger, bigger. Endless chasing all over New York, and endless bombs to defuse. It's sort of exhausting, even as someone who is simply watching the movie. Obviously there's a point to it all, but there's so many fakeouts and riddles and misdirection that it starts to get on your nerves.

Also, coming off of recently watching The Long Kiss Goodnight, for a movie about bombs the pyrotechnics in this movie are just okay. We're told the bomber is using some sort of cutting edge liquid bomb technology that packs gigantic explosive potential, and when we see a properly high dose of it go off, they use dated looking visual effects to make it seem bigger than it really is, and it still doesn't look very impressive. I don't think Cutthroat Island is a very good movie, but if Renny Harlin can blow up a real boat for that movie, and an entire (miniature) bridge for Long Kiss, I think they could have done a better boom here.

But I'll always have a soft spot for this movie. It was my first Die Hard. Just, y'know, not the best one. Definitely not terrible, though.