Jaws: The Revenge is a 1987 American thriller film produced and directed by Joseph Sargent. The fourth and final film in the Jaws franchise, it stars Lorraine Gary, who came out of retirement to reprise her role from the first two films, along with new cast members Lance Guest, Mario Van Peebles, Karen Young and Michael Caine. Acting as a direct sequel to Jaws 2 (retroactively ignoring the events of Jaws 3-D), the film focuses on a now-widowed Ellen Brody (Gary) and her conviction that a great white shark is seeking revenge on her family, particularly when it kills her younger son Sean, and follows her to the Bahamas.
The film was made in less than nine months, with production commencing in September 1986 so that the film could be released the following summer. The film was shot on location in New England and in the Bahamas and completed on the Universal lot. As with the first two films, Martha's Vineyard was the location of the fictional Amity Island for the opening scenes. Delays caused by the mechanical sharks and the weather led to concerns about whether the release date would be met. Many critics suggested that the rushed production compromised the quality of the film. The film was marketed with the now infamous tagline "This time, it's personal."The tagline is quoted in many sources, out of context of the film, such as: ;
Jaws: The Revenge was the lowest-grossing film of the franchise, with $51.9 million total gross on a $23 million budget, barely breaking even. It was universally lambasted by critics and audiences alike, who felt that the franchise had run its course, and some called it one of the worst films of all time.
Plot On Amity Island, Martin Brody, famous for his deeds as the police chief, has died from a heart attack. Martin's widow, Ellen, still lives in Amity, close to her younger son, Sean, and his fiancée, Tiffany. Sean works as a police deputy, and when he is dispatched to clear a log from a buoy a few days before Christmas, a great white shark appears and kills him.
Martin's older son, Michael, his wife, Carla, and their five-year-old daughter, Thea, come to Amity for the funeral. Michael works in the Bahamas as a marine biologist, and on his arrival, Ellen demands he stop his work. Having just received his first grant, Michael refuses. Thea convinces Ellen to return to the Bahamas with them.
The pilot of their small plane, Hoagie Newcombe, takes an interest in Ellen. Ellen begins spending time with him. Michael introduces his mother to his colleague Jake McCay and his wife Louisa, and they spend Christmas and New Year's together.
A few days later, Michael, Jake and their crew encounter the shark, which followed the family from Amity. Jake is eager to research it because great white sharks have never been seen in the Bahamas due to the warm water. Michael asks him not to mention the shark to his family. Ellen has nightmares of being attacked by the shark. She is able to sense when the shark is about to attack.
Jake decides to attach a device to the shark that can track it through its heartbeat. Using chum to attract it, Jake stabs the device's tracking pole into the shark's side. The next day, the shark ambushes and chases Michael through a sunken ship, and he narrowly escapes.
Thea goes on an inflatable banana boat, and the shark attacks the back of the boat killing another passenger. Witnessing this attack, Ellen boards Jake's boat to track down the shark, intending to kill it. After hearing about what happened, Michael confesses he knew about the shark, infuriating Carla.
Michael and Jake are flown by Hoagie to search for Ellen and find the shark in pursuit of their boat. During the search, Hoagie explains to Michael about Ellen's belief that the shark that killed Sean is hunting her family. When they find her, Hoagie lands the plane on the water, ordering Michael and Jake to swim to the boat as the shark drags the plane and Hoagie underwater. Hoagie escapes from the shark, and Jake and Michael hastily put together a device that emits electrical impulses. Jake is then mauled by the shark, but manages to get the device into the shark's mouth before being dragged underwater. Michael begins blasting the shark with the impulses. It repeatedly jumps out of the water, roaring in pain.
Ellen steers the sailboat towards the shark, while thinking back to the shark's attack on Thea and also imagining Sean's death, and Martin defeating the first shark. As the shark is rearing up, she rams the broken bowsprit of the boat into it.
In the original version of the film that was screened in the U.S., the shark bleeds out and dies after being impaled. In the revised ending (for international theaters and DVD release), the impaling causes the shark to immediately explode, and its corpse sinks to the bottom of the ocean (footage from the ending of the first film is used to show this). Jake dies in the original cut, but in the revised ending, Michael hears Jake calling for help, seriously injured but still alive. A short time later, Hoagie flies Ellen back to Amity Island.
Cast
Production Development As MCA Universal was going through a difficult period, its CEO Sidney Sheinberg saw that a third sequel to Jaws was likely to make a good profit, following the commercial success of Jaws 3-D, despite generally attracting negative reviews. Sheinberg also saw an opportunity to promote the Jaws ride at Universal Studios.
The studio fast-tracked Jaws: The Revenge into production in September 1986 so that it could be released the following summer. Steve De Jarnatt had been approached by Universal's Head of Production Frank Price about writing the script for Jaws IV, as it was then known. De Jarnatt's script, however, was shelved when Price resigned in September 1986 following the disappointing performance of Howard the Duck. Around this time, Sheinberg approached Joseph Sargent about directing the film. Sargent had worked with Lorraine Gary in 1973's The Marcus-Nelson Murders, for which he won a Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Miniseries or Movies for Television, his first. Steven Spielberg cites this television film, which later spawned Kojak, as motivation for casting Gary as Ellen Brody in the original Jaws film, in addition to the fact she was the wife of the studio's chief executive Sheinberg at that time. Regarding Revenge, Gary remarked in an interview: "I made a good deal on this film, but I didn't make as good a deal as I would have if I weren't married to Sid."
In an interview with the Boston Herald, Sargent called Revenge "a ticking bomb waiting to go off", saying that MCA Inc. president Sheinberg "expects a miracle." Sheinberg asked Sargent to direct the film in late September 1986. According to Sargent, Sheinberg "cut through all the slow lanes and got Jaws: The Revenge off and running." In a 2006 interview, Sargent stated that the premise was born "out of a little bit of desperation to find something fresh to do with the shark. We thought that maybe if we take a mystical point of view, and go for a little bit of ... magic, we might be able to find something interesting enough to sit through."
Sargent hired Michael de Guzman to write a script, within five weeks, with the shooting script being completed during production. According to the writer, they had the "bare bones of a story" by October 1986, and by November 2, 1986 they had a workable outline for the production team. The first draft was completed in mid-December, and the final draft of the screenplay was dated January 23, 1987, just nine days before filming began in Edgartown.
The film was developed under the working title Jaws '87, but by February 1987, the title Jaws: The Revenge was being used. The colon within the title is used by some sourcesExamples include , , , , and although the colon is not included in the film's opening credits, or on the poster.
The film has no continuity with Jaws 3-D. In its predecessor, Mike Brody (played by Dennis Quaid) is an engineer for SeaWorld, whereas in Jaws: The Revenge, he is a marine research scientist. One of the Universal press releases for Jaws: The Revenge refers to this fourth film in the series as the "third film of the remarkable Jaws trilogy." de Guzman's script featured an appearance by Matt Hooper, while the producers still hoped to recruit Richard Dreyfuss to reprise his role as Hooper for the project.
It was proposed that Martin Brody was to be the shark's first victim. When Roy Scheider declined to appear, Sargent reports that the character of Brody had been dead for 18 months "when we enter the story... and deal with Ellen Brody's emotional problem--her obsession with the death of another member of her family." For de Guzman, it "is a story of obsession and fear. Whether what Ellen Brody has in her mind is true or not will be left up to the audience to decide. No statement is being made in that regard... but it's about any kind of fear so great and so strong that it begins to take control of a human being's life."
de Guzman and Sargent were inspired by the first film's "less is more" approach. Replicating the idea of the yellow barrels in the original, they believed that having the shark swallow meat attached to a sonar device, emitting the sound of the shark's heartbeat, would create tension and be more effective than constantly seeing the shark or people being eaten. de Guzman asserts that the strongest characters in drama are often those off-screen, another justification for not showing the shark too often. Sargent expected the audience to appreciate what they tried to do, and had ambitions that it would not be seen as "a tired version of the first one."
Casting Lorraine Gary portrayed Ellen Brody in the first two films. In a press release, Gary says Jaws: The Revenge is "also about relationships which ... makes it much more like the first Jaws." This was Gary's first film role since she had appeared in Spielberg's 1941 eight years earlier, as well as being her final film role. The press release proposes that the character "had much more depth and texture than either of the other films was able to explore. The promise of further developing this multi-dimensional woman under the extraordinary circumstances ... intrigued Gary enough to lure her back to the screen after a lengthy hiatus."
Gary is the only principal cast member from the original film who returned. Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss refused to participate. Scheider had other commitments, and also had clearly expressed a desire not to play the character again. Lee Fierro made a brief cameo as Mrs. Kintner, the mother of Alex Kintner (Jeffrey Voorhees) who was killed in Jaws, as did Fritzi Jane Courtney, who played Mrs. Taft, one of the Amity town council members in both Jaws and Jaws 2. Cyprian R. Dube, who played Amity Selectman Mr. Posner in both Jaws and Jaws 2, is upgraded to mayor following the death of Murray Hamilton, who played Amity Mayor Larry Vaughan, in the first two Jaws films.
Gary states that one of the reasons she was attracted to the film was the idea of an on-screen romance with future Academy Award winner Michael Caine.
The first day we were to work together I was nervous as a schoolgirl. We were shooting a Junkanoo Festival with noisy drums and hundreds of extras. But he never faltered in his concentration and he put me completely at ease. It was all so natural. He's an extraordinary actor – and just a nice human being.