ROY STORY 2..........BQ SAILS BY "JAWS 2" ON ITS 40TH.......

                 Jaws 2 (1978)   40 years later, we still feel Roy Scheider's pain at having to contractually fulfill his obligation to appear in this movie.........vacuum-packed Universal Studios corporate sausage......

                   You can see it on his face, a mixture of anguish, frustration........barely controlling the urge to roll his eyes upward and check his watch for how many hours he has left on the clock......

                   Not that he doesn't give it his full commitment.........but everything's stacked against him.

                   The reptiles of Universal were never going to exert enough time and creativity into crafting a movie around Scheider's  tortured, emotionally damaged character.......

                   They got what they wanted, a 2 hour carnival ride to suck up a lot of quick cash from the summer rubes.......

                  In place of Spielberg, poor Roy ended up with Jeannot Szwarc as a director. Szwarc, a prolific television journeyman, functioned in much the same way as Universal Theme Park employees........

                  His one and only job........keep the huge operation running efficiently and cleanly.

                   With Szwarc, you weren't going to get all those magic little Speilbergian moments that made "Jaws" such a roaring worldwide sensation.......

                 All you were going to get was a Theme Park shark popping up to gobble up extraordinarily stupid teenagers and a random helicopter........

                 Szwarc was there to yell "cut" if any of the actors blew their lines or tripped over the furniture.  His creative contribution ended there.

                No wonder Roy Scheider looked as adrift, abandoned and out of options as he did in the final moments of "Jaws"...........it was like giving an emotional performance in a corporate training film......

                 Only one other participant besides Scheider made a genuine effort here.......composer John Williams, who went out of his way to write some lovely, cheerful themes for the teenagers' sailboat parties.........way, way better than the movie deserved.

                 But in a way, the movie benefited greatly when Universal Studios continued its greedy strip-mining of "Jaws" as a franchise..........their woeful, embarrassing "Jaws 3-D" and "Jaws-The Revenge" came out so noxious and ridiculed, they made "Jaws 2" look like a fine film in comparison........

               For Roy Scheider and John Williams, and them alone, we'll bite off  2 stars (**)..........the movie's tagline was correct.......it's not safe to go back in the water.....or go back to "Jaws 2" either......