Some movies are best left in the beach hut
Director: Seth Gordon. Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Zac Efron, Kelly Rohrbach, Priyanka Chopra
As a television show in the Nineties, Baywatch became a worldwide phenomenon, a kitsch classic serving up sun, seminaked beauties and very silly storylines. It was the stuff of teenage fantasy, so fixated was it with bums and boobs, jiggling away in sleazy slow-mo. As a film, it takes all these elements and jacks them up with steroids and machismo. Everything about Baywatch the movie is big, brash and bombastic.
Take its star, Dwayne Johnson. Radiating power and aggression, Forbes’s highest-paid actor of 2016 is preposterously buff in the role of chief lifeguard Mitch Buchannon, a part made famous by David Hasselhoff. Same goes for Zac Efron, whose frat-boy shtick is distinctly at odds with his physique here – no way could someone be that chiselled and still love a brewski. As new recruit Matt Brody, a disgraced Olympic swimmer, Efron is inevitably in full Efron-idiot mode: selfish, arrogant...drunk.
Directed by Seth Gordon (Horrible Bosses), this reboot is a straight-up action-comedy bromance, which aims for the self-aware high jinks of 2012’s 21 Jump Street but it misses its mark. Indeed, listing the film’s virtues isn’t going to detain us for long.
Any alchemy it has stems from a tongue-in-cheek Johnson and the way his character routinely belittles Brody with a stream of nicknames including “One Direction” and “Malibu Ken”. There’s also a pleasingly wry nod to the absurdity of the premise for the original series. “Everything you guys were talking about sounds like a really entertaining, but far-fetched TV show,” ironises Brody, on hearing that the Baywatch lifeguards intend to pursue a gang of hardened criminals.
But that’s it, really. The plot, about an Indian gangster queen (Priyanka Chopra) importing drugs along the coast, is wafer-thin and perfunctory at best. And yet, somehow, Gordon stretches the movie’s running time to two hours, beefing it up with a fatuous romantic subplot and not one, but two heinously long-winded penile gags ripped straight from the Farrelly brothers’ textbook of gross-out comedy. The women, meanwhile, are there purely to up the film’s phwoar factor: Kelly Rohrbach as CJ Parker and Alexandra Daddario as Summer Quinn wink and nudge but still say – and wear – very little.
Yes, the Hoff ’s cameo will pick up a few laughs, appearing as he does to the strains of Jimi Jamison’s Baywatch theme I’ll Be Ready, and yes, some will feel nostalgic during a super-slow-mo of Pamela Anderson. But, ultimately, this film should have been left in the beach hut, and certainly not encouraged to step out on to the sand.