Under Paris Movie Review

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Under Paris fails to deliver and with a lack of shark action in a shark movie, this one isn't worth watching.

In my preview for Under Paris, I said this movie was either going to be really good, or really bad with no in between, was that predication accurate? 

Well, it ventures more towards really bad and all just very very meh.

Lack Of Shark Action!

Call me fussy, but a good animal attack movie doesn’t need to be overly complicated, I want to watch characters get picked off one by one over the course of the movie with plenty of good kills where the animal in question just goes nuts on everyone it encounters.

Director Xavier Gens tries a bit too hard with Under Paris to make it something it isn't, the movie should be pretty straight forward, and as a shark movie, viewers know what they want. But Gens attempts to make the movie a bit too serious and sophisticated.

Bérénice Bejo stars as Sophia, a marine biologist who studies sharks and the movie opens with her and a team of researchers investigating the seventh continent, a massive floating pile of garbage in the ocean. 

During this expedition, they encounter Lilith, an abnormally large and very hungry mako shark and after a violent encounter where Sophia is dragged underwater by Lilith, the story then jumps forward three years. 

In Paris, an unexploded WWII ordnance is discovered in the Seine, and along with it, the presence of Lilith the shark. The mayor, played by Aurélia Petit, wants to keep this dangerous situation under wraps because of an upcoming major swimming event in the river. 

Despite the promising setup, Under Paris ends up being all a bit meh, with a lot of the movie filled with annoying characters standing around and arguing, which means you have to wait a while for the first major shark scene to actually happen. 

This action takes place in the flooded catacombs, where a group of idiotic people are trying to escape the shark but mostly end up slipping and falling into the sewers. 

There is surprisingly little actual shark action at all overall, and what is shown relies on some somewhat questionable CGI, and the characters are very annoying, you don't connect or care about any them, with dumb decision after dumb decision being made.

The ending has obviously been set up for a sequel, and I didn't actually mind the ending too much, it was OK, in fact the final 15 minutes or so aren't that bad at all, but it couldn't save what came before.

Not only was I expecting more shark action, but I was expecting more from Xavier Gens as I like some of his previous work, including Frontier(s). Although, Stephen King seems to like it!

I would give it a 5/10, it's watchable as a background movie I suppose, but it really fails to deliver and just ends up dragging before anything half decent actually happens. [Under Paris on IMDB]

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