Main cast: Bérénice Bejo (Sophia Assalas), Nassim Lyes (Adil), and Léa Léviant (Mika)
Director: Xavier Gens
Oh my, Nassim Lyes is one of the hottest men in cop uniform I’ve seen in a while. Sadly, he doesn’t show any skin here, a truly bold smashing of the stereotype that French movies are contractually obligated to feature at least one scene of full frontal nudity.
Sous la Seine, or Under Paris in the English-speaking markets, is a pretty standard shark gone wild movie, complete with the obligatory mayor that refuses to shut down a major water event because of the money spent and bad publicity.
To be fair, it’s the World Triathlon Championships held for the first time on the Seine, so I can imagine any mayor would balk at the thought of canceling the whole thing at the last minute only to find out that it’s a fake alarm.
Seriously, this movie can’t be released at a better time. since Paris is hosting the Olympics this year. Tune in people, to see if the triathletes would really get eaten by sharks in real time!
Anyway, the plot, yes? Sophia Assalas has a past with the shark, and no, it’s not like that.
Sophia, her husband, and her team were studying the “evolution” of some unusual sharks somewhere in the North Pacifuc. Their subject, Lilith, has grown to enormous size over a short time, much to their surprise.
The shark appears restless, but Sophia, who is safe on the boat, insists to the people down there that they must extract Lilith’s blood for study. Her husband, the genius, jabs the syringe without any preliminary precaution, and oops, everyone down there soon ends up as floating body parts or shark chow.
Sophia is now traumatized because oh, her husband and people died, and it’s really hard for her now, sob sob.
Cut to the present, when she is approached by cray cray animal activist Mika, who for some reason is able to link a shark that has find its way to the submerged catacombs under Paris to Lilith. While Sophia is at first reluctant to get more people killed, she soon realizes that people are dying anyway to Lilith, so hey, she may as well get involved!
I don’t know if it’s intentional, but my god, this movie has a pattern of idiot women sending people to die due to their inability to think clearly. There’s Sophia, and then there’s Mika, the imbecile that believes that sharks are harmless friends and humans are the true enemies so it’s hilarious and cathartic to see her finally get devoured by her “friends” after actively resisting being saved by Adil, and then there’s the mayor, of course.
The police chief Adil is hot and also sensible, but to be fair, he’s not that much better, but he certainly can keep cool under stress while the women here just lose it and make things worse as a result.
Indeed, this movie is powered by stupidity of the main characters, especially Mika. I’m not talking about behaving stupidly under extreme stress, as that can be understandable; this is more like characters deliberately making the worst decisions possible because they are just dumb.
Still, as annoying that the relentless tidal wave of character stupidity can be, I have to admit that this movie eventually ends up being so stupid in an entertaining way. The shark is bad CGI in a way that’s cute, and I have to laugh when the movie tells me that there are bombs from World War 2 still floating around in the Seine and these bombs are still working after all these decades being underwater. Also, these bombs can somehow cause a huge tsunami like some kaiju has paid Paris a visit!
Even the obligatory “climate change, humans bad” yammering ends up contradicting itself, as the climate change stuff is preached by annoying dumb twats like Mika and Sophia. Also, the whole thing isn’t exactly going to inspire people to change their environmentally unfriendly ways if doing so would make a hungry shark happy!
All in all, this one is more Jaws 3-D than Jaws. I’m sure that there are many better shark movies out there, but if one just had to watch this one for whatever reason, put the brain into sleep mode and just gawk at the absurdity galore.
