Word: scheiderer
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...story has its promising aspects. The protagonist (Roy Scheider, an actor who deserves something more than merely serviceable roles) is a shaky employee of the FBAP-the Federal Bureau of Advanced Paranoia, that usually unnamed, entirely fictional dirty-tricks agency that turns up with distressing regularity in recent movies. The reason Roy is shaky is that a bunch of baddies have killed his wife while aiming at him. Discharged from a rest home, he gets the strong impression that his bosses no longer have any use for him, and indeed we see them running his dossier through the paper shredder...
Much running about ensues, as two forces stumble over themselves in their desire to dispatch Scheider. Like so many younger film makers today, Demme is generous in his implied homages to Hitchcock. His camera buzzes around like a mosquito looking for some place to draw blood. Maddeningly, the script offers a number of scenes that suggest an air of gathering menace, but it never quite manages to stitch them together into a tense line of force. Nor does it offer substitutes that can compensate for that defect-an off-the-wall characterization here, an unexpected plot twist there, a memorable...
Still, there is a haunting and finally deadly darkness in the romantic entanglement between Scheider and Margolin. She is driven by a slightly implausible need to revenge wrongs done to her grandmother over half a century before. Even as he falls in love with her, it becomes interestingly possible that he may be the vic tim of her loony side too. Add in those neat acting cameos and Last Embrace is not a total loss. It is just that the movie is not all that it might have been or promised to be. The title implies a certain passionate intensity...
Jaws 2 does have a few things in common with its illustrious forebear. It cost tons of money, is set around Amity (a.k.a. Martha's Vineyard), has a score by John Williams and stars a rather petulant shark. Roy Scheider, looking unaccountably like George C. Scott after a hunger strike, is back as the local police chief, and so are a few members of the Jaws supporting cast (Murray Hamilton, Lorraine Gary, Jeffrey Kramer). But the crucial elements of the original have vanished: there is no wit, no genuine terror and no cinematic dazzle. The first Jaws was made...
...actors do their best to avoid rising above the script. The star of the movie, Roy Scheider of Jaws fame, looks like George C. Scott without Scott's nose, but he is also missing Scott's talent. The script forces the only talented actor to commit suicide near the onset of the movie. Too bad for him, maybe, but a great chance to splatter some more blood on the screen...