There’s something so strange about hearing The Rock say the word “taint” and he does that quite a lot during the largely unfunny big-screen reboot of Baywatch.
The original 1990s Baywatch TV show saw a team of Los Angeles lifeguards dealing with situations way above their paygrade, and that ridiculous notion is revisited for this movie.The main difference is that where the TV show was largely played straight, this new version is billed as a balls-out comedy – something which director Seth Gordon takes great pleasure in fulfilling in the most literal sense with multiple scenes involving male genitalia getting messed around with. I like a good bit of filth as much as the next human, but the problem with Baywatch is that its main gag wasn’t that funny even before it was run into the ground.
The screenplay is by writing duo Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, whose previous gigs include Freddy vs. Jason and the Friday the 13th remake; films which don’t really scream hilarity. And despite a story written by various Reno 911! alumni, the whole thing bounces between over the top gross-out humour to extremely weak, gag-based comedy.It’s hard not to compare Baywatch to 2012’s 21 Jump Street, as the latter’s box office success was no doubt a factor in the decision behind the former’s production. They’re both original television drama series given new leases of life in comedy movie form. The problem here is that Baywatch seems to lift 21 Jump Street’s main story almost entirely – this time it’s lifeguards attempting to keep drugs off their beaches instead of undercover cops keeping drugs out of schools. It all seems so laboriously familiar and derivative where 21 Jump Street’s unexpected take was novel.
Most of the assembled cast of ridiculously attractive people end up criminally underused, with Zac Efron as Olympic gold medal swimmer Matt Brody getting a particularly bad time of things. In previous comedies, such as the Neighbours movies, we’ve seen Efron play his beautifully sculpted type with slightly more nuance, whereas here he acts exactly like you’d expect an irredeemable buff bro stereotype would: he’s egotistical, brash, and ends up just being annoying. There’s also a crazy change in his character halfway through the movie when he becomes super-dumb out of nowhere and fails to understand basic human concepts.
The taint-obsessed Dwayne Johnson, as head lifeguard Mitch Buchannon, doesn’t fare much better, with most of his intended-to-be-funny insults hurled at Efron falling flat due to their one-note nature. He does, however, redeem himself in the latter half with a scene in which his character is forced to reevaluate his life. At that point, Johnson is hilarious as a clueless Average Joe.
The only other highlight is Priyanka Chopra as nefarious entrepreneur Victoria Leeds, who outshines pretty much anyone she’s in a scene with. Chopra’s engaging and interesting and is the only character that speaks with any kind of distinctive cadence, with the rest of the cast falling into the exact same pattern of delivery of their hackneyed gags. None of them are given much of anything to do, either.It also seems like a lot of the film’s budget was spent on the cast because some action scenes are dripping in bad effects; one scene involving a fire on a boat is particularly terrible, and I had to wonder whether the filmmakers made it look purposely bad in an odd homage to the small-screen budgets of the 90s. But probably not.
