La cage va dans l'eau. .

My thoughts on Under Paris

If you know me—and my deepest condolences to you if that is the case—you know that two things that I have a deep and unabashed affinity for are French cinema and movies featuring sharks chomping up people people too dumb to stay the hell out of the water. Needless to say, when I heard of the existence of Under Paris, the new film from director Xavier Gens (whose grisly past films have included Frontier(s), not-that Hitman and this year’s Mayhem! that dares to combine those two elements into a single gruesome cinematic amuse-bouche, I knew I had to check it out. The resulting film is, of course, preposterous, but it also happens to be a lot more fun than it has any real right to be

A few years after a trip to a heavily polluted stretch of ocean to track a shark, dubbed Lilith, ended with her crew being decimated by a group of mako sharks, traumatized researcher Sophia (Berenice Bejo) is informed by a group of young climate activists that the long-missing shark’s transponder signal suggests that she has somehow made her way into the Seine river. This sounds preposterous, of course, but when it becomes clear that this is the case, she tries to sound the alarm, especially since the city is about to host a triathlon as part of the hype for the upcoming Olympics. Inevitably, the mayor refuses to cancel the event and does everything to keep the danger a secret. Meanwhile, the activists hatch their own plan to track down Lilith and lead her to safer waters. As you can probably guess, things don’t go very well on either front and Sophia, along with a group of cops led by the hunky Adil (Nassim Lyes), tries to figure out a way to save the day before things get too bloody. Spoiler Alert—she doesn’t.

Although the movie is undeniably loopy—never more so than in the scenes when it tries to offer up scientific-sounding explanations for the various attempts to explain the increasingly baby developments involving Lilith and her new habitat—Gans doesn’t constantly hit you over the head with its self-conscious absurdities in the manner of the various installments of the blessedly dormant Sharknado saga. Instead, he is more concerned with coming up with the kind of audaciously grisly visuals designed to impress even those who have seen way too many killer fish movies over the years and I have to confess that he has done just that. There are two sequences in particular—one occurring about an hour in and the other serving as the over-the-top climax—that combine breathless action, dark humor and lots and lots of blood and body parts into expertly staged celebrations of cinematic carnage that have to be seen to be believed. Sure, the scenes set out of the water pretty much follow the established template for this particular subgenre—right down to the mayor hell-bent on ignoring the problem until it swims up and bites her on the derrière—but Gans gets through them with a minimum of fuss, aided in no small part by the likable and sympathetic performance by Bejo as the heroine.

In the grand scheme of movies involving dumb people being eaten by sharks, Jaws is, of course, still tops, followed by the ingenious Blake Lively vehicle The Shallows. Under Paris never quite hits those heights, of course, but it is definitely one of the more inspired films of this sort to come around in quite a while. It is a film made with a considerable amount of style (the cinematography by Nicolas Massart is especially impressive) and wit, not to mention a whole lot of blood as well. It is too bad that the film is only appearing here on Netflix because I can definitely imagine crowds going wild for it in a theater, especially during those two aforementioned setpieces. Even at home, though, Under Paris is a lot of wacko monster movie fun—so much so that even those who haven’t liked a shark-related film since the original Jaws may find themselves getting an unexpected kick (not to mention flail) out of its wild variation on an all-too-standard theme.