When “Baywatch” isn’t straining to inspire laughs, it bumbles through action set pieces so devoid of excitement that the producers of the old TV show might find themselves embarrassed. Attitude a hard time? That’s pretty much the best “Baywatch” offers in terms of humor.
Put it this way – the running gag with Mitch calling Brody by various boy-band names to give Mr. They just get to wear low-cut red swimsuits and run in slow motion. While the male characters are basically one-joke wonders (Mitch is overzealous, Brody’s a jerk, Ronnie’s a hapless nerd), the female leads are so poorly underwritten that they don’t even get one joke. To make things worse, the banter throughout the film is lifeless. Then, about a third of the way through the film, those wink-wink style gags get jettisoned in favor of even clumsier slapstick, as in “watch our heroes disguise themselves as doctors to sneak into a morgue!” Sounds hilarious, right? No, it really doesn’t, and it’s not much funnier watching it play out on screen. In the early going, many of the film’s gags and one-liners rely on people pointing out to Mitch, “Hey, lifeguard! You’re not a cop!”
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In effect, that’s six people trying to figure out how to turn what was admittedly a inadvertently funny premise for a TV show – lifeguards as crimefighters – into a deliberately funny and entertaining film.Īpparently, some of those people were truly enamored with the idea of characters in the film pointing out just how silly that premise was. “Baywatch” credits four people for the film’s story, and two more for the screenplay. Whip the newbies into shape, stop drug dealers from taking over the beach, be sexy and perfectly tanned while doing it all. All he needs is proof that the stray baggies of the drugs that keep washing up on the shore are coming from the swanky beach club. The lieutenant aims at stopping the flow of a new, highly potent drug onto his beach, and he suspects the new owner of a nearby beach resort, Victoria (Priyanka Chopra) is behind it all. Matt’s bad attitude is just one of Mitch’s concerns, however. Mitch doesn’t want him and Brody really doesn’t want to be there, but he’s stuck after some public drunken antics get him in trouble. Olympic star swimmer and would-be bad boy Matt Brody (Efron), on the other hand, clashes with Mitch immediately. Fresh-faced Summer (Alexandra Daddario) and excited but out-of-shape Ronnie (Jon Bass) are welcome new members of the team. They take on crimes on the beach head-on, which never fails to annoy the local police.Īs the film opens, the Baywatch team inducts three new trainees, but only two of them willingly. They don’t just make sure beach goers put on their sunscreen and sometimes pull someone from the water when the currents overwhelm them. Parker (Kelly Rohrbach in the Pamela Anderson role). Mitch takes his responsibility for safeguarding the Bay very seriously, as do his two trusted teammates, Stephanie Holden (Ilfenesh Hadera in the role played on TV by Alexandra Paul) and C.J. In “Baywatch”, Johnson takes up the role made famous by David Hasselhoff, lifeguard Lt. The film does deliver a handful of giggles, but they aren’t nearly enough to save the rest of the mess audiences tread water through for almost two hours. The Rock gives his tanned 'n tatted-up all, and Zac Efron is as chiseled-pretty as he can be, but this poorly conceived revival of the 90s TV favorite just can’t decide what it wants to be: cheeky, in-on-the-joke parody, over-the-top slapstick comedy, or credible action film. What he’s cooked up in “Baywatch” smells really, really bad.