BEACH BLANKET BOZOS
Tedious big-screen Baywatch goes for lowbrow gags with idiotic results
When ideas become intellectual property, their value becomes material rather than creative — and so a trite TV show from 1989 may be lucrative to reboot even if artistically it’s utterly without worth.
Who cares if this is stupid and irrelevant? It’s a coherent piece of work — a poem, a play, a line of action figures — that an enterprising producer in need of material can acquire.
Baywatch is the latest symptom of the IP plague. It closely resembles symptoms past: Like other TV action dramas of the decade extravagantly contemporized for
the big screen, from Charlie’s Angels to CHiPs, Baywatch in its big blockbuster iteration is a flippant, juvenile comedy, only nominally indebted to its source material and desperate to prove itself above it.
Like Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s successful Jump Street movies, Baywatch proceeds from the correct assumption that the majority of its audience will not remember the original series and will not retain any particular affection for it even if they do, which liberates it to both ridicule the premise and mock the very notion of making a film of it all — a funny joke in Jump Street that seems rather more insulting to the moviegoer here.
And like nearly every studio comedy in recent memory, Baywatch is leaden, tedious, mirthless and nondescript.
There are something like a half-dozen screenwriters credited with writing Baywatch.
Here is what this meeting of the minds managed to devise: a brawny career lifeguard, played by The Rock, teams up with a disgraced Olympic swimmer, played by Zac Efron, and together they investigate a nefarious Indian-American country-club owner, played by Priyanka Chopra, who rules a narcotics-smuggling empire and aims to privatize the public beach where our investigator/ lifeguards work.
The Rock’s character is written as the Good Cop who plays by the rules, only sometimes he doesn’t, and it’s never clear from one scene to the next whether he’s meant to be the force’s voice of reason or the loose cannon who needs to be reined in.
Efron, meanwhile, portrays both the level-headed all-American Adonis and a dimwit in the style of Derek Zoolander. The film is written like a buddy action comedy. Who is the straight man and who is the wise guy? The Rock and Efron each seem to want to be both.
So the mismatched comic duo fumbles through madcap beachside exploits, none original, amusing, nor delightful. There’s a zany episode involving a dead man’s testes in the morgue, strikingly similar to a scene in Bad Boys II, only less tasteful. There’s an escapade at a classy function in which one of our heroes dances in a silly way and another falls into a pool.
At one point a man finds his penis improbably wedged between the slats of a wooden patio chair and must wince when it’s yanked out. What shall I do with this absurdity? It’s like watching a frat comedy produced by the direct-to-video division of National Lampoon. Much of what purports to be humour here, not surprisingly, is lowbrow in the extreme, though dressed up as knowing meta-commentary.
The film, you see, is quite aware of how ridiculous it is that a group of lifeguards should solve crimes — and this point is mentioned ad infinitum, a little punchline at the expense of a bad show.
But a movie this idiotic, this short on creativity and ideas, is in no position to sneer at David Hasselhoff trotting down the beach on our TV screen. At least that foolishness was in earnest.
To be so dumb and also ironic is the far graver sin.