BAYWATCH
½ 2017, R, 116 mins. Dwayne Johnson as Mitch Buchannon / Zac Efron as Matt Brody / Alexandra Daddario as Summer Quinn / Kelly Rohrbach as C.J. Parker / Priyanka Chopra as Victoria Leeds / Ilfenesh Hadera as Stephanie Holden / Rob Huebel as Captain Thorpe / Pamela Anderson as Casey Jean Parker / Hannibal Buress as Dave the Tech / Charlotte McKinney as Julia / David Hasselhoff as The Mentor Directed by Seth Gordon / Written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift |
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I'll
start this review with a very simple and beyond obvious question: Was anyone on
planet Earth really clamoring for a big budget movie adaptation...of
BAYWATCH? I pose this
question after just having seen the extremely wrongheaded and pitifully
awful CHiPS, another large scale silver screen appropriation of a small
screen program. BAYWATCH
tries, I think, to be a would-be uproarious send-up of the original
1980's/1990's TV show of the same name that stared David Hasselhoff and
Pamela Anderson and concerned L.A. County lifeguards patrolling the
beaches, saving lives, and stopping crime.
The series was laughably non-transparent, though, about what it
was: a trashy celebration of T and A, at least as much as a network could
get away with twenty-plus years ago.
BAYWATCH was junk television, but I don't think it had any
pretensions about what it was, nor was it trying to sell itself as
something it was not. The BAYWATCH
movie, on the other hand, takes the film's cheeky source material and
harnesses it to hard R-rated levels of wanton crudeness.
Attempting to do what, for example, the 21 JUMP STREET films did
before (and much more successfully),
director Seth Gordon desperately amps up the nauseating levels of
raunch here, and in the process (a) never really re-captures the shows eye
rolling cheesiness and (b) makes the fundamental mistake of confusing
gross out humor, bodily fluid gags, graphic nudity, and f-bomb obsessed
dialogue exchanges with high hilarity and shrewd satire.
BATWATCH is one of the most humorless and charmless adaptations of
a TV show that I've ever had the displeasure of sitting through, which is
made all the more damning considering that it mournfully squanders the
limitless charm and appeal of Dwayne Johnson as a performer.
Johnson appears
as Mitch Buchannon, the Hasselhoffian ringer and leader of the
aforementioned group of L.A. County lifeguards that takes his position as
serious as a heart attack. He's
flanked by the film's requisite female eye candy that serve as key members
of his team: Stephanie (Ilfrenesh Hadera), C.J. (Kelly Rohrbach, using her
ample cleavage to do 99 per cent of the acting), and three others that are
training to become all that they can be as lifeguards - Summer (The Rock's
SAN ANDREAS co-star Alexandria
Daddario), the tubby and out of shape Ronnie (a
fingernails-on-a-chalkboard annoying Jon Bass), and former Olympic gold
medallist swimmer Matt Brody (a slumming Zach Efron), who thinks he's
above everyone else that's trying to make the team.
While the new recruits try to curb favors with their potential new
boss in Mitch, a nefarious businesswoman (a completely un-menacing
Priyanka Chopra) engages in a vast - and completely convoluted and
nonsensical - scheme to turn the beaches into a vast drug smuggling
empire. I will say this about BATWATCH: Almost all of the actors are irreproachably attractive and have remarkable bodies to look at (if anything, this film is an equal opportunist when it comes to ogling shots of both men and women in frequent states of undress that shows off their perfect frames). That, and the film does contain some picturesque shots of its beaches at magic hour that are mightily impressive. That's where the accolades stop. BAYWATCH is an unsavory comedy dead zone throughout its excruciatingly longwinded running time of nearly two hours (two...hours). This is not assisted by an overall "plot" (sarcastic quotes intentional) about the female baddie involving narcotics, some shady real estate dealings, and - gasp! - multiple grizzly murders that are never once as compelling as this film thinks it is. The film's borderline juvenile approach to humor is its prime undoing. Part of what made, say, 21 JUMP STREET such a winning comedy is that it had fun lampooning the TV series that preceded it and had sweet and likeable characters that made its adult themed pratfalls work. The makers of that film established a well oiled tone and maintained its consistency throughout it and its sequel. BAYWATCH is an amateurish tonal disaster; this movie can never decide what it really wants to be. Is it trying to be a semi-serious exploration of the mental rigors and physical dangers of lifeguard life? Is it aiming to be a spoof of Hollywood action films and studio updates of small scale TV fare? Is it aiming for the low brow and sensationalistic jiggle factor of the show that inspired it? Is it aiming to be a monumentally crude and vulgar riff heavy comedy that pushes the boundaries of its rating? Gordon
and his screenwriters' schizophrenic indifference to the material here is
frankly off-putting. And why does a
BAYWATCH movie need to be...unrelentingly dirty and foul mouthed?
I'm no prude at all, but this film suffers the same fate as the
illogically engineered CHiPS in the sense that its end game is to be as
mindlessly scatological as possible in hopes that carries the film.
Aside from a main title sequence - replete with CGI dolphins
jumping over the title cards and high fiving each other - the insufferable
jokes and hijinks on display here are distractingly unfunny within the
film's first ten minutes. Take,
for instance, the character of Ronnie, an out of shape schlub that's
supposed to be a riot because - wait for it - he's not carved out of
granite like Johnson or Efron. When the film's not engaging in fat shaming humor at his
expense, it's placing him in revolting scenes that - I kid you not - have
him getting his penis and testicles caught in-between a beach chair's
slats, resulting in C.J. (whom he's crushing on) trying to get him out
(he got his erection when she performed a Heimlich Maneuver on him while he
was choking). Penis centric
gags don't end there, as is the case with a later scene in a morgue
(don't ask) that involves the hapless stooge that is Matt fondling the
naked junk of a corpse while looking for clues.
I was in a cinema
with roughly ten people while watching BATWATCH and there were zero
laughs, let alone chuckles, to be heard during moments like this that humiliated good
actors (Efron in particular has proven that he can do comedy, as was the
case with the first NEIGHBORS film, but
BATWATCH and efforts like DIRTY GRANDPA
and MIKE AND DAVE NEED
WEDDING DATES are making me rethink his acting chops to deliver
sustained laughs). The
biggest sin of BAYWATCH, as mentioned, is Johnson appearing in this
tasteless, paycheck grabbing dreck. I
admire him and find him to have an on-screen personality that's both
electrifyingly charismatic and likeable.
He's made many films that I've greatly enjoyed.
But outside of a hefty payday, I don't have the foggiest idea why
an intelligent and multi-talented performer like him thought that
BAYWATCH was a winning star vehicle.
He's inexplicably also listed as a producer here, which is as
confounding as it is shameful. The other massive disappointment here is Seth Gordon, who started his career making one of the most absorbing docs of recent memory in THE KING OF KING: A FIST FULL OF QUARTERS and then has devolved into one indefensibly putrid comedy after the other with IDENTITY THIEF, HORRIBLE BOSSES 2, and now this. Very few comedies that I've seen lately have struggled so mightily to justify their existence - and their questionably distasteful handling of their material - as much as BAYWATCH. It's a film that also unequivocally proves that nostalgia for properties only works on properties that were once adored by legions of fans. When two BAYWATCH TV series regulars made cameos in the film I'm reasonably sure that many in attendance had no idea who they were. One of them also had a dialogue-free cameo. She was arguably the smartest actress in this film as a
direct result. One last thing:
The Rock took to Twitter recently to champion the supporters of this
film and condemn its harsh critics.
He tweeted that "fans love it...critics hate it" and that
people "just want to have fun" watching movies. Firstly, BAYWATCH's audience score was barely over 65% on
Rotten Tomatoes, which is not a ringing endorsement of your film by fans.
Secondly, BAYWATCH emerged as a box office bomb this past weekend,
so "fans" never showed up to see it, smelling a dog with flees.
Lastly, critics are fans of movies too, arguably more so than lay
filmgoers. We see literally everything that casual viewers don't.
Contrary to popular belief, we all want to enjoy ourselves at the
movies and wish for everything we see to be good.
BAYWATCH is not
good. It's miserably
unwatchable. There's an eyebrow raising lesson to be learned here, Mr. Johnson: never overestimate the appeal of your unappealing movie to a wide audience.
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Watch me talk about this film on my annual BEST/WORST of 2017 Midterm Report Card CTV Segment: |
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