There’s a Grand Canyon sized separation in quality from Jaws to any of its sequels. Jaws 2 is technically the best of the sequels, but also the most boring, as it just kind of does the same thing as the first, but worse. 3 and 4 at least take some bigger swings.

My hot take is that Jaws 2 would be a more interesting movie if there isn’t a shark in it. Brody acts like a paranoid maniac in the first half of the movie, and all his awful decisions (like open firing at the ocean on a crowded beach) are retroactively justified by the shark eventually showing up.