MAN THE LIFEBOATS!
This remake of Goldie Hawn’s 1987 comedy Overboard gives you that sinking feeling
THIRTY years have passed since the Goldie Hawn/ Kurt Russell comedy Overboard sank not quite without trace, but without leaving too many bubbles either.
This remake chugs along amiably enough, without ever justifying its presence on the silver screen.
The original, directed by Garry Marshall, had a very Eighties kind of plot, which was not unreasonable for a film released in 1987.
But it’s still a very Eighties plot, which in 2018 is as disorientating as finding Cagney & Lacey on the telly, or T’Pau in the charts. The only concession to modern, hashtag sensibilities is that the genders have been reversed. In 1987, the butt of the film’s single joke was a woman. Now it’s a man.
The celebrated Mexican actor Eugenio Derbez plays Leonardo Montenegro, the obnoxiously spoilt, unashamedly feckless heir to a Mexican construction fortune, who spends his life swanning around the world on his fabulous yacht, a gift from his father unsubtly called Happy Birthday, quaffing champagne in the hot tub with a posse of bikini-clad beauties.
ANNa Faris is Kate Sullivan, his demographic opposite, or at least as opposite as this film dares to go. She is a single mum trying to raise three daughters in an Oregon seaside town, while holding down two jobs and studying to become a nurse.
The implication even at the start is that despite Leonardo’s grotesque wealth and Kate’s financial hardship, she is richer in all the things that really matter. She has a loving family, loyal friends and a good heart. He has his $60 million yacht and the world’s third-richest man as a father, but his life is empty.
They encounter each other when she is hired to shampoo the carpets on his boat.
Naturally, he treats her appallingly. ‘I hate rich people. They get away with everything,’ she complains, which is not the zippiest bit of movie dialogue you’ve ever heard, but sums up the situation nicely.
It’s really no spoiler to reveal, since it’s telegraphed from the off, that the rest of the film is all about him gradually learning the value and virtue of compassion, responsibility, rectitude and plain hard work.
The writers are Rob Greenberg, who also directs, and Bob Fisher. They don’t acknowledge their debt to a certain sage of ancient Greece, but they should. aesop told the same story much more economically in his fables.
as well as a moral fable, however, this is also a screwball comedy which in 1987 played nicely to Goldie Hawn’s strengths. Faris, who made her name in the Scary Movie films, has something of Hawn’s kooky charm, but in a way that leaves the remake — the film-makers prefer ‘reimagining’ — looking even more unnecessary.
The plot hinges on Leonardo falling overboard, and being washed ashore where he is found to have lost his memory. He has no idea who he is or where he’s come from, and his amnesia is Kate’s cue to claim him as her missing husband, and reinvent him as little more than a domestic servant.
The script daftly, but deftly, skips past the issue of the marital bed by Kate telling him that sex has been banned for a month, until he has addressed his alcohol problem.
In the meantime, Leonardo’s family are grieving his death. They assume he’s been eaten by a shark, which, this being a movie that hungrily feeds off other movies, facilitates a couple of cheeky Jaws references, including a police chief called Brody.
ONE OF Leonardo’s sisters is, in fact, aware that he’s still alive, but is content to leave him be, so that she will get to take over the company from their apparently dying father.
and that’s pretty much all you need to know, except that John Hannah pops up in a minor role as Leonardo’s Scottish steward, looking mildly uncomfortable at finding himself aboard such a vessel of silliness.
Whether Leonardo turns into a paragon of an industrious, loving paterfamilias, I mustn’t divulge. But if you’ve absolutely nothing better to do, you might enjoy finding out. Overboard isn’t a bad remake, just a rather pointless one.
aptly, for a film about an amnesiac, you’ll forget it the moment you leave the cinema.