Review: Under Paris (2024)

This could be subtitled 'Lesbians destroy the world' and I am not going to elaborate beyond that statement, because if I had to watch the movie for context, so do you.

Under Paris follows traumatized marine biologist Sophia (Berenice Bejo) who, three years after her research team is killed by a shark named Lilith, finds herself once again dealing with the bloodthirsty fish, this time in the Seine River instead of the Pacific Ocean.  Jaws references abound, up to and including the Mayor of Paris (Anne Marivin) refusing to cancel the scheduled triathlon despite warnings from Sophia and police sergeant Adil (Nassim Lyes).  Will our heroes stop the shark before disaster strikes?  No, and is that even really a spoiler?

This movie is so, so dumb.  I hate to break it down to such a base level, but there really isn't much more to say other than that.  People make the dumbest possible decisions throughout (our two main characters avoid such a fate, but only barely), the plot continues for the dumbest possible reasons, and the ending is so, so, so very dumb.  The only smart part of this screenplay is the decision to make the shark a mako instead of a great white, but even then, the other notable existing shark movie (1999's Deep Blue Sea, up there with the 1997 Anaconda as among the best of the late 90s so-bad-they're-good creature features) already did it.

You know, that's not fair, the movie also makes one other smart choice by naming the shark Lilith.  Going into the why of it would be a spoiler, but I'll just say that it is the cleverest thing the screenplay does by a wide margin, and that is fairly damning of the overall quality of the screenplay.

The performers take this movie seriously - too seriously, to be honest - but do a decent enough job with the material.  Bejo, an Oscar nominee for The Artist, is very much slumming it here, giving the character way more emotional depth than this screenplay warranted.  No other performance is of particular note, as the plot doesn't really give any other character, save Adil, more than basic characterization.

I will admit, with this type of movie, it becomes a game of guessing the kill order, maybe deciding one of the doomed side characters is my boyfriend for this film (sometimes I get lucky and they live, though that was not then case with this one), and hoping that it at least veers into camp territory to at least make things fun.  Is a character insufferable?  I expect them to last longer than others because these movies love to keep that sort of annoying character around.  This movie slightly subverts that.

I almost with this movie was truly atrocious, so at least I could mock it better, but there's so much competence outside of the screenplay that it just ends up being a minor failure as opposed to a delicious trainwreck.  I can't even recommend it for a hate watch!  Which is truly the greatest crime this film commits.

4 out of 10