I never really saw what all the fuss was about...

Rating: 4/10 (3 December 2000)

Sure Jaws started a massive monster movie craze which has lasted all the way up to the present day, an was undisputedly a huge box office success worldwide, but that isn't saying it's necessarily a great or necessarily good movie. I always found this film good in places but overall the viewing experience is an overlong and generally unpleasant one.
This film has all the essentials of a good shark movie, the 3 R's... yeah Roy, Richard, and Robert. Yes, the acting in this film is surprisingly top-notch for the genre, even Shaw who almost overdoes his thick seaman drawl to the point where it often becomes hard to understand. There's also a classic musical score by John Williams, who with the Star Wars and Indiana Jones tracks has become one of the most successful composers in history, film or otherwise. Probably the best aspect though is the photography which looks even more mystifying at night-time with an almost silvery-great look to the water than it does during the day.
There, so it's a good movie but the hype surrounding it is totally overblown. First of all, there's not really much in the way of action in this film. There only are 4 actual shark attacks over the course of the film's 120+ minute running time. The film slows down terribly near the end with the three men endlessly bantering amongst themselves ending with several repetitive scenes of them shooting harpoon after harpoon into the shark. Maybe it's just the overfamiliarity of the subject matter that has come over the years, but the scene has very little in the way of tension. The mechanical sharks look awfully cheesy during some of the close-up shots revealing some wrinkles in the rubber nose. On top of that, the ending was completely ridiculous, in that there was no way the guy could have gotten out of the cage and hid from the shark for several minutes.

So to conclude, this film is a good movie, but it never was really worthy of the classic status its overblown hype has brought it.