Nudge, nudge, wink, wink
Baywatch movie spoofs the original’s clichés — but has that become its own cliché?
The funniest scene in the new Baywatch movie comes at the very beginning, when Mitch Buchannon, the leader of an elite team of lifeguards, takes his place atop the stand with the alertness and prideful countenance of a bald eagle.
He notices a shift in the wind, which sends a yellow caution flag whipping to the left. Immediately sensing catastrophe, he dashes full speed across the beach, calculating the parachute’s precise trajectory as it heads toward a line of rocks jutting into the ocean. Mere moments after the occupant lands in the water, smacks his head and loses consciousness, Mitch scoops him up and cradles him in his massive arms like a newborn.
As Mitch, Dwayne Johnson emerges from the water like Poseidon himself, with chiselled features glistening in the sun. A wave crests in the background as the title, Baywatch, fills the screen in giant block letters. A pod of dolphins pirouette in formation behind him, popping off like a fireworks display. The image couldn’t be any tackier if it were airbrushed on the side of a van or printed on T-shirts at a boardwalk gift shop.
In short order, director Seth Gordon (Horrible Bosses) and his screenwriters, Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, have made it abundantly clear that their Baywatch will be irreverent, cool and knowing — everything the long-running syndicated TV show was not.
They snicker at Mitch’s Lassie-like instincts for danger and the absurd, outsized perfection of his body, which resembles a Humvee emerging from a car wash. And most of all, they snicker at the very idea of a Baywatch movie, which is almost too stupid to contemplate.
Their instincts are correct: Baywatch was a bad television show, a stultifying hour of stock plotting and aquatic derring-do that nonetheless thrived in syndication, due to the appeal of its stars, David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson, and its “jiggle TV” prurience. Attempting a straightforward, big-budget version of Baywatch would be commercial suicide, so instead, the filmmakers treat it like a piece of cultural flotsam that has washed up on the shore. The tone is affectionate parody and it has become a successful formula of its own.
The Brady Bunch would seem woefully out of date two decades later, so The Brady Bunch Movie cast the family as cheerfully oblivious relics in the modern world. Charlie’s Angels, too, could not survive its inherent sexism, so it made a joke out of the skimpy costumes and martial arts. Few people remember 21 Jump Street as more than an early springboard for Johnny Depp, but the concept of young undercover cops infiltrating high schools and colleges was enough to revivify the series to hilarious effect.
On top of the throwback subplots and the obligatory cameos from the original stars, comedies such as The Brady Bunch Movie, Charlie’s Angels, 21 Jump Street and Baywatch all have the same little wink, that moment when the film hips the audience to its own fundamental silliness.
In 21 Jump Street, the deputy chief explains the operation to his young recruits thusly: “We’re reviving a cancelled undercover police program from the ’80s and revamping it for modern times. You see, the guys in charge of this stuff lack creativity and are completely out of ideas, so all they do is recycle s--- from the past and expect us not to notice.”
But how deep into this hall of mirrors can we go? Baywatch may not attempt the earnest adventure of the original TV show, but there are many times when its irreverence doesn’t make it any brighter — or even much different of an experience.
When Mitch and the gang try to infiltrate a narcotics ring running out of a fancy resort, we’re meant to laugh over the deliberate silliness of it, but after a while, it doesn’t seem like a joke anymore.
And for as many times as the characters point out the strange phenomenon of beautiful women running in slow motion, the film ends up ogling right alongside them.
Self-awareness allows comedies such as Baywatch to absolve themselves of their own sins because they cast their failings as deliberate. But there’s a dangerous tipping point at which a film can become the thing it’s parodying, or when revealing clichés, becomes a cliché in itself.
Quotation marks are not a defence against criticism or a ticket to some topsy-turvy world where up is down and trash is treasure. Sometimes a “bad movie” is just a bad movie.