Under Paris Review
Sometimes it feels like there are as many shark movies as fish in the sea. Sadly, most of them are not just atrocious but proudly, perhaps even intentionally so. Blame the success of that portmanteau of portside cable schlock, Sharknado – or, at the other end of the budgetary waters, The Meg, a gimcrack B-movie with a blockbuster’s allowance. Both are probably, partly responsible for the school of artless fin flicks arriving every beach season on cue. No leviathan is too rubbery or unconvincing, no performance too amateurish to sink these cut-rate creature features. When the audience demands only aquatic absurdity, when it actually craves Rifftraxable blood in the water, is it any wonder that the studios, streamers, and networks keep dumping chum?
Under Paris, new to Netflix (and, at the time of this writing, the top movie on the platform), is a cut above the bottom feeders of the subgenre. Compared to the average Jaws wannabe, this French thriller is practically, well, Jaws. Make no mistake, this is a very silly movie, rendered no less silly by playing its ridiculous premise – a maneater loose in the City of Light – completely straight. But the basic competence of the whole thing, combined with a discernible effort to do more than provoke heckles from indiscriminate streamers, lands it a little higher in the food chain of shark movies. It does not settle for “so bad it’s good,” which makes up a little for it falling well short of “actually good.”
Speaking of Steven Spielberg’s seminal summer blockbuster, this is the rare descendent of that classic that actually bites its plotting, too. “Jaws in Paris” captures the general shape of a story that follows a mutant mako from the Thames to the Seine. (The opening text is Darwin’s – a perhaps unreasonably highfalutin note on which to begin a mercenary feeding frenzy of a thriller.) We’re told, in a pseudoscientific info dump, that global warming and pollution are to blame for the shark’s newfound ability to survive in freshwater. Blithering climate skeptics can rest easy, however: This is an eco-friendly monster movie that makes “bleeding heart environmentalist” quite literal.
Naturally, the mayor (Anne Marivin) wants to go forward with a big triathlon event in the river, even after half-eaten bodies start floating to the surface. (Carnivorous capitalism is not, it would seem, strictly an Amity Island problem.) Our Hooper figure is Sophia (The Artist’s Bérénice Bejo), a marine biologist who loses her whole crew in a three-years-earlier encounter with the beast. The movie takes her grief seriously, which does not mean we must. Bejo’s commitment to the material is like a touching SOS: You want to rescue such an overqualified actor from the maw of canned melodrama. Something tells us that, like Michael Caine before her, she’ll enjoy her view from whatever the movie buys her.
There’s a Brody here, too: steely cop Adil (Nassim Lyes), who initially spars with Bejo’s heroine, until he remembers to look at the photo of the dead platoon he keeps on his desk and realizes they’re not so different after all. Under Paris does not, sadly, make room for a salty Robert Shaw type – or any character we might actually care about. The ensemble is more of a menu: These cops, scientists, and animal-rights activists spend most of their time staring at little shark-shaped icons blipping across screens, before becoming fish food. The ruthlessness won’t come as a surprise to anyone who caught the cult French gorefest Frontier(s) from the same director, Xavier Gens. That said, the violence here is much more cartoonish: We get no fewer than three shots of a digital body tossed skyward and snapped between a set of equally digital teeth.
Gans lends Under Paris a slick patina of drone-shot adequacy familiar to any number of fellow Netflix time depleters. At times, the colorful screensaver sheen of the imagery borders on striking; at the very least, you’ll leave grateful that you can make out everything happening underwater. (As far as clarity of deep-sea footage goes, it’s closer to the shimmering legibility of The Way of Water than the unintelligible murk of Wakanda Forever.) As for the sharks, ultimately plural, they look believable when gliding ominously slow, cheap as all hell when darting in for the kill. One is reminded that motion still flummoxes our greatest CGI technicians, to say nothing of the team assembled here.
Make no mistake, this is a very silly movie, rendered no less silly by playing its ridiculous premise completely straight.
The fun of Under Paris, such as it is, lies in the film’s poker-faced efficiency. Beyond some hand-wringing about munched colleagues, it just charges forward, from one chase to the next. When it’s funny, it’s unintentionally so, which is much preferred to the cult-courting deliberate cruddiness of Syfy programmers. And when it delivers, it does so with mercenary mercilessness: A rampage through the flooded catacombs (yes, the sharks take a dip there) is topped only by the film’s stupidly destructive finale, a vengeful maritime massacre that culminates with a string of exploding bridges and a Paris halfway underwater. The closest any of this ever really comes to Jaws is the “dun dun” of the Netflix logo, a sonic cousin to the iconic John Williams theme. But in the very shallow pool of modern shark thrillers, Under Paris is more big fish than minnow.
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