SWEPT AWAY BY CLICHÉ
TOTAL amnesia as a comedic trope has been played out for decades, but it drags itself out of the depths for Overboard, a remake of Garry Marshall’s 1987 Goldie Hawn-kurt Russell vehicle.
Reversing gender roles to have Mexican comedy star Eugenio Derbez play the spoilt billionaire and Anna Faris the working-class mom who exploits him, first-time directors Bob Fisher and Rob Greenberg start off with a movie so dull it threatens to vanish from the viewer’s memory before it’s even finished.
Things get better midway through, with the directors’ screenplay finally playing to the talents of at least one of its stars, Derbez.
Faris plays Kate, a young Oregon widow raising three girls while working two jobs and tolerating one unreliable mom (Swoozie Kurtz). Mom was supposed to be caring for the kids during Kate’s last month of studying for a nursing exam, but she just ran off to join a touring theatre troupe, leaving Kate in the lurch.
Derbez is Leonardo, the son of a construction-materials magnate. While his sister Magda (Cecilia Suarez) slaves away at the family business, hoping to take control when their father dies, Leonardo lives in a “floating orgy” – boozing and canoodling with models on a giant yacht.
Kate is hired to clean the yacht’s carpet, and when she refuses to fetch Leonardo some snacks, he pushes her overboard as he motors out to sea. He goes overboard himself just hours later, tumbling drunkenly and waking up on the Oregon coast with no idea who he is.
Magda concocts a story that he was killed by sharks, so nobody is looking for him.
Learning of his situation, Kate and her friend Theresa
(Eva Longoria) hatch a pretty ridiculous plan. They go to the hospital to tell doctors and Leonardo that he is Kate’s husband, Leo, an alcoholic who fell off the wagon and went missing recently.
Kate brings Leo home with the idea that he’ll pay off what he owes her (with interest) by being her domestic slave.
Predictably, if tardily, a funny thing happens on the way to poetic justice: Leo starts to become a decent man. As a performer, Derbez opens up as the script gives him slightly more interesting things to do.
The film wrings a couple of laughs from near-misses, though these scenes are hardly tailored to Faris’s screwball gifts.
Maybe Fisher and Greenberg recently fell from a yacht as well, and forgot how funny she can be. – The Hollywood Reporter