BAYWATCH – Review

BAYWATCH begins so promisingly! Dwayne Johnson as Mitch Buchannon, chief lifeguard of Baywatch, dives into treacherous waters to rescue a drowning parasailer. He then rises from the water grinning ear-to-ear as dolphins leap in the background and the movie’s title, sculpted in stone, rises from the ocean. This opening sets a perfectly silly tone but one that the film can’t maintain as things slowly go downhill from there. Don’t’ get me wrong –  BAYWATCH is good, and I’ll be seeing it again opening weekend, but it’s a far cry from the masterpiece I think we were all expecting. Time to silence that Oscar buzz.

The elements are here for epic summer indulgence – vulgar comedy, explosive action, a dream cast, a vamping Bollywood superstar, cameos from the TV show’s original stars, and a sea of fine bikinied bottoms. So how do they screw up the big-screen BAYWATCH reboot? Much of the problem is with the film’s length and its tone, which is all over the map. It’s never sure if it wants to be a self-aware satire a la 21 JUMP STREET or a conventional action film. Sometimes it seems like the filmmakers just dusted off an old Baywatch TV script and filmed it with a straight face, while other times they’re ridiculing the show with winking postmodernism. One problem is that BAYWATCH doesn’t offer a vision of its source material that will appeal to either those who hold the show dear or younger moviegoers who may not realize this is an adaptation in the first place.

When things stay on the beach, which it does for about the first 40 minutes, BAYWATCH is a lot of fun. There are tryouts for Mitch’s elite Emerald Bay lifeguard team where the new recruits (and cast) are introduced. There’s Ronnie (Jon Bass), the chubby nerd with the hots for always-running-in-slow-motion blonde CJ (Kelly Rohrbach). There are brunettes Summer (Alexandra Daddario) and Stephanie (Ilfenesh Hadera) and there’s Matt Brody (Zac Efron),  a disgraced Olympic swimmer who’s forced on the crew as a publicity stunt, something Mitch is not too happy about (his name-calling  of pretty-boy Matt – “New Kid on the Block” “One Direction”, even “High School Musical” –  is one running gag that works). Director Seth Gordon fills the frame with gorgeous people and luscious scenery in these early scenes, but soon a generic crime plot kicks in involving murders and drugs and cover-ups and the whole enterprise starts to go south.  The team is soon trying to stop a drug-running villainess (Priyanka Chopra ) who has some vague plan to buy the surrounding community in hopes of establish a massive crime operation. This leads to a series of pointless, loud action scenes at nightclubs, aboard yachts, and in a morgue that stretch the film to almost two hours. I just kept wishing they’d get back to the beach.

There are a lot of raunchy, gross-out scenes that earn BAYWATCH its R rating (though surprisingly no nudity – unless you count one dead man’s schlong). There’s an encounter with dripping bodily fluid at that morgue and Ronnie getting his dong stuck between the wooden slats of a chair, but for a movie ostensibly about beach boobs, there are far more jokes about penises than breasts. Much of this is funny (much is not), and the cast is clearly having a good time, but so many scenes drag on and on (that’s what the ‘deleted scenes’ feature on the Blu-ray is for). The screenplay feels a few drafts away from something that might have worked. BAYWATCH is uneven in that way, veering from scathing humor to patience-trying nonsense and back again, but it does ultimately wind up just barely on right side of good and bad. I wish more thought would have gone into the cameos from David Hasselhoff and Pam Anderson. The Hoff grunts a couple of lines in one terribly-written scene and an air-brushed Pam is barely there

Any attempt to adapt a television series for the big screen is inherently an effort to wring cash out of a dormant property, leveraging name recognition in the hopes that it will translate into solid box office. Reviving a beloved show without fresh ideas is why we have more films like WILD WILD WEST and CHIPS and fewer like MISSION IMPOSSIBLE which reinvigorated its franchise decades after the show went off the air. BAYWATCH falls somewhere between those extremes.

2 1/2 of 5 Stars