Movie Review: Baywatch

Baywatch ** / *****

Directed by: Seth Gordon.

Written by: Damian Shannon & Mark Swift and Jay Scherick & David Ronn and Thomas Lennon & Robert Ben Garant based on the series created by Michael Berk & Douglas Schwartz and Gregory J. Bonann.

Starring: Dwayne Johnson (Mitch Buchannon), Zac Efron (Matt Brody), Priyanka Chopra (Victoria Leeds), Alexandra Daddario (Summer Quinn), Kelly Rohrbach (CJ Parker), Ilfenesh Hadera (Stephanie Holden), Jon Bass (Ronnie Greenbaum), Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Sgt. Ellerbee), Hannibal Buress (Dave the Tech), Rob Huebel (Captain Thorpe), Amin Joseph (Frankie), Jack Kesy (Leon), Oscar Nuñez (Councilman Rodriguez), David Hasselhoff (The Mentor), Pamela Anderson (Casey Jean Parker), Clem Cheung (Murray Chen).

 

I’ll admit that as a young man, I watched a lot of Baywatch. It wasn’t because I particularly liked the show, and it wasn’t wholly because in the days before we had the internet in my house, it was a good source to watch bouncing boobs in slow motion. I think it had more to do with the fact that it was always on late Saturday afternoons, and was one of the only shows (along with Kung Fu: The Legend Continues) that my family could all get some sort of enjoyment out of. It was always a cheesy show, and it was never very good – and I knew that even when I started watching it when I was around 10. But because it aired in the 1990s, and was popular, and now people my age and a little older seem to be in charge of everything, we got to keep bringing back all the crap that was popular in that decade. So, here’s Seth Gordon’s Baywatch.

 

To be fair to the film, it is probably about as good as it could possibly be. No, that still isn’t good, but the filmmakers at least have enough sense that they don’t take the premise at all seriously, and poke fun of it (and the series it’s based on) pretty much from beginning to end. It also does well to cast Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron as the low leads – Johnson as Mitch Buchannan, and David Hasselhoff role, as leader of the Baywatch crew, and Efron as Matt Brody, the young hotshot who needs to learn the ropes. I do wish that the film paid any sort of attention to any of the other characters.

 

The premise of the movie is knowingly ridiculous – Leeds (Priyanka Chopra) – is a drug dealer, with a high society veneer, and for reasons that confuse Efron’s character to no end, it’s up to the lifeguards to stop her (“Am I really the only one who thinks we should just call the police” he asks at one point, and apparently, he is). Yet, for the most part, the film exists as an excuse to string cheesy gross out gags, one liners and slow motion shots on CJ Parker (Kelly Rohrbach) running, mostly followed by jokes about her running.

 

I do wish that the film had paid some more attention to the actors around Johnson and Efron. They get all the good lines, all the good moments, and basically the female characters are reduced to bouncing boobs, and tight ass shots – and making jokes about those doesn’t prevent them from being shallow – at least not as much as the film thinks it does. Alexandra Daddario, who plays Summer, has been good in other roles – but she’s given nothing of interest to do. I don’t know if model turned actress Rohrbach is any good as an actress at all, because the movie doesn’t even attempt to give her a personality. Say what you want about the sexism of the original series – and you could say plenty, but the female characters in it were real character – and not just bouncing boobs.

 

Having said all of that, I cannot say I hated Baywatch. I certainly didn’t like it, but perhaps because I expected it to be so awful, I actually found myself laughing at a few moments, and generally watching the film wasn’t overtly painful. It’s way too long (nearly two hours) and is deeply, deeply flawed. But I’m not sure it’s possible to make a good big screen version of Baywatch – and this film kind of backs that theory up.