An Uneven Shark Movie
This movie has some really cool parts and some parts that are brutal. SPOILERS below, so swim in the post at your own risk.
The main character had a bit of a cliche backstory with the whole past shark trauma thing, but it's cliche for a reason: it kinda works. Anyway, the character of Sophia is written pretty believably. She's brave, but not impossibly so. She's wrestling with trauma and grief. She's reasonably smart and clever...
The supporting cast aren't very memorable (although I liked the homeless dude!) with maybe the exception of Ben. Ben was well acted and had some nuance to her. The rest are pretty bog-standard movie characters.
The movie's best part is the premise. The idea of a shark in the Seine and the catacombs of Paris is cool. They blend in some climate change stuff without being too preachy about it. But then...
As the movie progresses, the premise gets more and more ludicrous. Asexual reproduction, freshwater adaptations, massive growth - all in one shark. It's like they're dealing with the first shark X-Man mutant. By the end of the film, they're somehow causing dormant shells to blow up the Seine so hard that it floods Paris. Almost everything about the ending is inexplicably ridiculous.
Is it scary? No. It relies on a lot of jump-scares, no real dread or terror. It isn't shot in an interesting way. Very cookie-cutter.
The worst part, to me, was the squandering of the great premise. I thought they were going to have to deal with saving the fish instead of just killing it. Needing to deal with the predator without just blowing it up might have been a nice twist. Instead, they relegated "save the shark" to the activists.
Although, frankly, that was one of the most accurate depictions of activists I've seen: odd hair styles/colours, kids who don't know nearly as much as they assume they know, hearts in the right place/ head's up their own a**es... yup, they got them right to a T. Watching the smug, bone-headed, bad-decision-making doofus leader of the activist group get torn to absolute ribbons was very satisfying. I'm all for save-the-planet, but Mika had it coming.
Overall, if you're a shark movie fan, it might be kinda fun for the premise, but it's a bit ho-hum and weirdly inert. It can't quite decide if it has a message or just wants to be stupid, dumb fun and suffers from not picking a lane.