Even the Hoff himself couldn’t rescue salty Baywatch reboot
Like everyone else who was there at the time, I remember Baywatch. The old Nineties TV show somehow managed to be all high-cut swimsuits, bosoms bouncing in slow motion and David Hasselhoff diving into the sea clutching what appeared to be an orange hot-water bottle, and yet was still broadcastable before the watershed.
But surely you can’t get away with that sort of sexist nonsense well into the second decade of the 21st century? Well it turns out you can or at least that you can try, as the makers lose no time in demonstrating in the new film version of Baywatch (15A) The swimsuits are still cut high enough to prompt a rather good end-credit joke and the first bosoms are set a-jiggle inside two minutes. In slow-motion, naturally.
The only difference now is that it’s the über-muscular Dwayne Johnson rushing around with that hot-water bottle, presumably on the grounds he and a buffed-up Zac
Efron will provide a female audience with the same sort of visual treat as their female co-stars, Kelly Rohrbach and Alexandra Daddario, do for men. There are other obvious differences. The original TV show had a certain cheeky charm but here, in a film carrying a 15A certificate, well, the first of many F-words is dropped inside five minutes, followed by a painfully protracted erection gag.
For a long time, the film seems laughably awful, as Lieutenant Mitch Buchannon (Johnson) and his lifeguard gang reluctantly welcome disgraced Olympian Matt Brody (Efron) as their newest, coolest member and set about investigating illegal drugs and dodgy property deals. But it did almost win me over, helped by the facts that Johnson – a man so strong he can pluck an endangered beauty from a burning boat with one arm – is an undeniably charismatic presence, Horrible Bosses director Seth Gordon knows what he’s doing and Hasselhoff himself pitches up for a cameo. Another member of the original cast graces the finale but, I warn you, somewhat less happily. I can definitely see a sequel on its way.
Spark: A Space Tail (PG) is from the same animation stable as 2014’s The Nut Job and, despite the box office-boosting voice cast – Jessica Biel, Susan Sarandon, Patrick Stewart – you can tell its origins lie elsewhere.
The humour seems a little lost in translation. But the animation is crisp and colourful and, when you’re looking for ways to entertain the kids, you can’t write off a film that comes across as part Wall-E, part The Monkey King.
Here the monkey is young Spark, who was orphaned when the evil Zhong unleashed the black-hole-creating space kraken on the planet Bana. Thirteen years on, Spark lives on a planetary fragment with a resourceful fox (Biel) and a bungling warthog (Rob deLeeuw). There’s also a nanny robot, Bananny (Sarandon).
The first half-hour is painfully slow but it does all perk up once Spark has got his hands on his own space kraken and locked horns with Zhong. Seven years ago, Diary Of A Wimpy Kid was one of the unsung treats of 2010, a live-action adaptation of Jeff Kinney’s books. But even in America, child actors cannot remain child actors for ever, so, after two sequels the franchise is rebooted with a new cast. The result, Diary Of A Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul (PG) is painfully awful, hampered by a charmless cast and a criminally lightweight story. A long haul indeed. Matthew Bond