Baywatch

Baywatch is nowhere near as awful as that CHIPs movie we got a couple months ago.  But here's the thing.  CHIPs was memorable in how bad it was.  I likely will remember it as one of the worst movies ever made off of a TV show for a long time to come.  Baywatch, on the other hand, simply is lame beyond belief, and I will probably be hard pressed to remember a single thing about it by July.

This is a movie that doesn't know if it wants to be a spoof of the TV series that spawned it, or if it wants to take its plot seriously.  Therefore, we get a lot of scenes early on that poke fun at the slow motion running that was made famous on the show, followed by long stretches where the movie seems to think we actually give a damn about the plot concerning drug dealers and dead bodies washing up on the beach.  It also gives us the prerequisite cameos of David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson, but gives them nothing to do in the context of the movie other than to just show up. (Miss Anderson does not even get any lines, and is a literal walk on.) Therefore, I cannot say with any certainty if the fans will enjoy this comedic adaptation.  All I can report on are my personal thoughts, and to be honest, this movie did next to nothing for me.

The movie more or less follows the original formula of the TV show, with a bunch of California lifeguards saving lives, and getting wrapped up in bizarre criminal plots.  The difference is that this is the hard-R interpretation, so we get a lot of "F-Bombs" and jokes built around the male genitalia, such as a scene when a hapless and overweight lifeguard trainee named Ronnie (Jon Bass, who seems to be channeling Josh Gad for most of the movie) gets his privates stuck in a chair, and we get graphic close ups.  But the real plot concerns head lifeguard Mitch Buchannon (Dwayne Johnson, likable as always) trying to get to the bottom of a high level drug cartel that seems to have moved onto his beach.  He suspects that the mastermind is a sultry land developer (Bollywood actress Priyanka Chopra) who has recently started buying up most of the land, as well as buying the support of wealthy political figures, and having her henchmen murder the ones who refuse to cooperate. 

Mitch is teamed up with Matt Brody (Zac Efron), a disgraced Olympic swimmer who has been placed on the lifeguard team mainly as a P.R. publicity stunt.  He has two Gold Medals that he likes to carry around with him at all times to remind everyone and himself of his former glory, but he is mostly a washed up drunk these days.  Still, some of the people on Mitch's team still believe in him ("You're like the Stephen Hawking of swimming, minus the whole paralysis thing", someone tells him.), so he ends up working alongside Mitch.  When the dead body of a powerful local Councilman washes up, Mitch is the first to suspect foul play.  However, as local cop Sgt. Ellerbee (Yahya Abdul-Mateen, II) likes to remind him, Mitch is a lifeguard and not a police officer, so he should stay out of investigating the murder.

And so Baywatch unfolds, without much inspiration or invention.  It's the kind of movie that seems designed to be watched by a listless and bored audience.  Maybe there's an occasional giggle or two, but they are not worth the experience of sitting through this dragged out and tedious film. (Did I mention the movie runs an overly long two hours?) And because the movie frequently goes from parody to slightly more serious-minded action comedy, I was never able to detect a consistent tone that director Seth Gordon (Horrible Bosses) was going for.  He seems to be trying a different angle in each scene.  This is why some of the characters seem to change from scene to scene, depending on what's necessary.  In the case of Matt Brody, sometimes he's depicted as a totally clueless bozo who can barely speak English, while in other scenes, he seems a bit more on the ball. 

Baywatch also simply doesn't build momentum like a comedy should.  It's curiously flat and muted, with long periods where the movie seems to forget it's supposed to be trying to make us laugh, and just goes for straight up action.  Even the more absurd action set pieces, such as the one where Mitch gets in a dragged out fight with one of the villain's goons in a little girl's bedroom and they beat on each other with her dolls and other toys, seem desperate instead of genuinely funny.  We're supposed to laugh at the fact that Dwayne Johnson is getting choked by a SpongeBob doll, I guess.  A better movie would have found a funnier use for it.

You can tell that this movie has been made in good cheer, and only wants to entertain, but it never quite succeeds at that noble goal.  It's not that funny, the gross-out humor isn't shocking, and the action is immediately forgettable.  I expected many things from a Baywatch movie, but I must confess, being bored was not one of them.

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