Baywatch - Review

Lt. Mitch Buchannon (Dwayne Johnson) tries to get his new lifeguard recruits in gear, including former Olympic swimmer Matt Brody (Zac Efron), so he can have some backup when it comes time to deal with a shady lady (Priyanka Chopra) operating a secret drug operation outside her fancy beach resort. BAYWATCH is in all purposes a highly mediocre product and a very lame and tame adaptation of the cheesy syndicated television series but it's shoddy construction and being nearly two full hours laugh free makes it an insufferable watch. The film had an easy opportunity mocking while also celebrating the weird mixture of goofy police procedural and frank fan service involving scantily clad ocean workers that made the show a huge hit. Instead the makers decided to go with the old stand-by of drugs on the beach and evil rich people buying up land and corrupting government officials and playing it completely straight for again nearly two hours. The rest of the so-called script is a literal mish-mash of ideas, with subplots coming and going or hitting the brakes swiftly and crashing on screen. They can't tell the full scope of Zac Efron becoming a real team player or the slow ascension of the female second-in-command because they need to have some more pointless vulgar banter between the male leads and incite more nerd spunking by having an unfunny fat guy getting close with a model making her real acting debut, I mean a highly trained and attractive blond. The humor is basic juvenile jabs, the kind you would see rampant in student films or as placeholders in real feature films until they can come up with better material. Director Seth Gordon just lets the cast just mouth off expletives left and right with no punch to any of them, praying that the gullible ones in the audience will laugh and that others will give his latest misfire a shot given its R rating. If that doesn't work, throw in an obnoxiously long gag in a morgue involving simmering gay panic and gross genitalia and bodily fluids. The cast is all wasted here, particularly the actresses who often just sit on the sidelines and spend more time wearing many different outfits than they do with actual plot importance. However, I was generally shocked at how utterly boring Dwayne Johnson is at times during the film. This guy was able to do as much as he could with awful kiddie crap like THE TOOTH FAIRY but he couldn't even make every scene in this comedic tripe barely passable.


FINAL REVIEW: 1 / 5