Dated Goldie Hawn remake should be buried at sea

Overboard 12A cert, 112 min

Dir Rob Greenberg

Starring Anna Faris, Eugenio Derbez, Eva Longoria, Emily Maddison, Swoosie Kurtz, John Hannah, Mel Rodriguez

The remake of Overboard, in its way, is a radical achievement. It’s a 2018 release that manages to feel far more dated and regressive than the film it’s based on – Garry Marshall’s 1987 romcom with Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell at the peak of their adorability as America’s sweethearts.

The original is not without elements that would be flagged today as “problematic”. Hawn, queening it up as the ultimate “rich bitch”, succumbs to amnesia after tumbling off her yacht, and is then tricked and forced into servitude by Russell, a widowed handyman and single father-of-four, as revenge for treating him like dirt in the opening reel. But there was enough chemistry to make it a staple of Nineties TV schedules, where it was adopted anew after middling success.

No such afterlife awaits the new version, however appealing gifted comic actress Anna Faris might sound as a substitute for… Kurt Russell. That’s right. This version flips the leads’ genders, clearly hoping to de-creepify the story, with Faris as Kate Sullivan, a harassed maid who takes revenge on Eugenio Derbez’s playboy Leonardo.

Mexican star Derbez may well be a non-terrible actor in other contexts, but anglophone audiences haven’t had many chances to tell. He’s been playing variations on the same role since his 2013 surprise hit Instructions Not Included, and feels lazily cast here as an egotistical Latin lover.

Also, at 56, he’s 15 years Faris’s senior, so how’s the de-creepifying going when he persists, with zero chemistry, in trying to bed her? Not well, is the answer. And when director Rob Greenberg gives up the ghost near the end, whole scenes from the original are replicated shot for shot.

Boot this one straight off the poop deck and don’t look back: it’s truly an abomination.