Eat your heart out, Seaspiracy. (Actually that’d take too much finesse. Just bite the whole torso off, and I’m sure the heart will be in there somewhere.) That’s right, Under Paris is the new king of attempting to scare people out of overfishing. Will it actually scare anyone out of overfishing? Well that would be great, but it is not the point.
The point is that THERE IS A SHARK LOOSE IN THE SEINE! And the Olympics, during which competitors will be swimming in the river, is in just a few weeks! Could they just use an alternative venue? The Parisian mayor, angrily stabbing her salad at this inconvenience, scoffs at this possibility, and tells them to just get rid of it (i.e. the shark). Getting rid of it, however, in the implied sense, goes against everything our heroine Sophia Assalas (Berenice Bejo) stands for. She is all about saving the oceans, which includes preserving the sharks—even this shark: the shark that ate her husband and three of her colleagues three years ago, before attacking her as well, which has now suddenly appeared in her hometown! It’s also the shark that had doubled in size over a few weeks, and now, the shark that has somehow figured out how to breathe in fresh water. “C'est impossible!”
By the end, we manage to uncover even more, even crazier shark mutations, see a face-off with a brood of sharks in an underwater crypt beneath the famous Parisian catacombs, witness explosions, ponder at unexplained flooding, recoil at many, many severed limbs, and watch a shark toss a police boat in the air like pizza dough. Then, it's garnished with a bit of sexual tension that, like so many things in this film, ends up dead in the water.
There are many, many details of this movie that are spectacularly dumb, and I hope you get the sense that I could go on for paragraphs. This is the best kind of terrible movie: the earnest kind. The Godzilla vs Kong movies, the Sharknado movies, they’re winking at you, knowing they’re terrible, and I find that annoying. The fact that this is unaware of its own badness makes it a rare bird indeed.
For a movie like this one, the acting isn’t bad. Bejo does what she can with the lines she’s given. Nassim Lyes, who plays Adil, the police sergeant working with her on the shark-elimination plan, is also passable, even if he’s helped by being stupidly good-looking. Lea Leviant, too, playing the leader of a Gen-Z ocean-preservation cult, has some real charisma. But no one can touch Anne Marivin as the tempestuous, narcissistic mayor of Paris, comparable only to JK Simmons in the Spiderman movies. Honestly her aggressive salad interaction will forever live on in my memory.
Under Paris will situate itself in the deadly-animals-on-the-loose canon somewhere near Snakes on a Plane and my personal favorite, Deep Blue Sea (which is the inspiration for this blog’s name). Unfortunately, this one did not feature Samuel L. Jackson and is not in English, and therefore not as many people will see it, and that’s a pity. But it's not as much of a pity as what happened to those unsuspecting triathletes, and what will happen to anyone who turns this on expecting to not become dumber.
