Sorry, Dwayne Johnson fans. What he’s cooked up in “Baywatch” smells really, really bad.
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.
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.
What’s it about?
In “Baywatch”, Johnson takes up the role made famous by David Hasselhoff, lifeguard Lt. Mitch Buchannon. 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. Parker (Kelly Rohrbach in the Pamela Anderson role).
They don’t just make sure beach goers put on their sunscreen and sometimes pull someone from the water when the currents overwhelm them. They take on crimes on the beach head-on, which never fails to annoy the local police.
As the film opens, the Baywatch team inducts three new trainees, but only two of them willingly. Fresh-faced Summer (Alexandra Daddario) and excited but out-of-shape Ronnie (Jon Bass) are welcome new members of the team.
Olympic star swimmer and would-be bad boy Matt Brody (Efron), on the other hand, clashes with Mitch immediately. 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.
Matt’s bad attitude is just one of Mitch’s concerns, however. 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. 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.
Whip the newbies into shape, stop drug dealers from taking over the beach, be sexy and perfectly tanned while doing it all. That what Baywatch is all about, right?
Too many cooks
“Baywatch” credits four people for the film’s story, and two more for the screenplay. 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.
Apparently, some of those people were truly enamored with the idea of characters in the film pointing out just how silly that premise was. 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!”
Sounds hilarious, right? No, it really doesn’t, and it’s not much funnier watching it play out on screen.
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!”
To make things worse, the banter throughout the film is lifeless. 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. They just get to wear low-cut red swimsuits and run in slow motion.
Put it this way – the running gag with Mitch calling Brody by various boy-band names to give Mr. Attitude a hard time? That’s pretty much the best “Baywatch” offers in terms of humor.
Lackluster action
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. The special effects look cheap, and the fights look like outtakes from better films Johnson has starred in.
Is that on purpose, to mimic how cheesy the action was on the old show? Perhaps, but if that’s the case, they didn’t go far enough in their effort to create parody.
It doesn’t come off as deliberately funny – it just looks poorly executed.
Worth seeing?
Even hardcore fans of the TV show who revere “The Hoff”, Pam Anderson, Carmen Electra and that really catchy theme song will be hard pressed to enjoy this boat fire beyond its opening minutes. Better to just stay home and search for re-runs of the TV show than to pay the price of admission here and be left waiting for the original stars to make their obligatory cameos.
Put it another way -- think about seeing “Baywatch” over Memorial Day weekend the way you would a day at the beach when two red flags are flying near the lifeguard stand.
Two red flags? Stay out of the water.
Baywatch
Starring Dwayne Johnson, Zac Efron, Priyanka Chopra, Alexandra Daddario, Jon Bass, Kelly Rohrbach, Ilfenesh Hadera, with Pamela Anderson and David Hasselhoff. Directed by Seth Gordon.
Running time: 114 minutes
Rated R for language throughout, crude sexual content, and graphic nudity.