Under Paris is a 2024 French action horror film directed by Xavier Gens, and the cast includes Bérénice Bejo, Nassim Lyes, Léa Léviant, Anne Marivin, Aurélia Petit, Marvin Dubart, Ibrahima Ba, Sandra Parfait, Nagisa Morimoto, Stéphane Jacquot, Jean-Marc Bellu, Yannick Choirat, and Maud Forge.
I said to a friend before watching this that this movie that I think this was either going to be really good, or really bad with no in between, was that predication accurate?
Well, it ventures more towards bad and it's all just very very meh.
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.
We then arrive in Paris, where 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!
Under Paris really fails to deliver and just ends up dragging before anything half decent actually happens, but by then, it is far too late.
Oh, and the film is getting a Sequel as I speculated above. Oh joy.
I would rate this film 40% on my horror movie nerd-o-meter.
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