Faris wasted in Overboard
Overboard (M, 112 mins) Directed by Rob Greenberg
I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen all of the 1987 Goldie Hawn/kurt Russell movie this – I’m told – loose-remake is based on. I dunno how I’ve avoided it, since it seemed to be on TV at least once a month for most of the 1990s. Maybe I’m just lucky.
The setup is pure 1980s rom-com fodder. A very rude rich person gets knocked out and wakes up not knowing their own identity.
And then a struggling single parent who has had a run-in with the rich person shows up at hospital, claims to be the spouse, and takes the rich person back home to learn some humility while they do chores around the house, get an honest job and help raise the kids.
This time around it’s Mexican superstar Eugenio Derbez playing the tycoon with the attitude problem, and Anna Faris as the hard-working single parent who runs the con, in a gender switch of the 1987 storyline.
And Derbez and Faris are by far the best things about Overboard. There’s not exactly great chemistry between them, but individually they can both deliver a line to perfection. No one else – not even a cameo from Swoosie Kurtz as Faris’ mum – really registers.
Listen, I wasn’t aware of any online petitions demanding a remake Overboard. And now that it’s here, with the optics of Faris ordering her Mexican man-slave about the house just as tone-deaf and queasy as the original’s underlying misogyny, I’m really not sure why anyone bothered.
Derbez deserves a Hollywood career, but this isn’t the film to launch it, and Faris is a superb comic talent who could handle a far more ambitious vehicle than this.
For a few cheap and resolutely undemanding laughs on a Friday night, Overboard is probably just about good enough.