Review of Baywatch (2017) by Dan L — 23 Aug 2017

Baywatch is a shallow, run-of-the-mill action "comedy" that fails to embrace the campiness of the TV show. I use the word "comedy" loosely because Batwatch isn't very funny.

I laughed twice, maybe chuckled once, but cringed about three times, especially during the scenes with Jon Bass, who's the unfunny comic relief in the film. Not even the scene where his erection gets stuck in a beach chair was funny. It's a scene that reminded me of a much funnier scene in There's Something About Mary where Ben Stiller accidentally zipped up his scrotum.

Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron were pretty entertaining pairs on screen. I'd love to see them in a better movie together just as much as James Franco and Bryan Cranston, who also starred in an unfunny comedy recently that I wished was better. The rest of the cast didn't really get much to do, especially the female cast who were relegated to the sidelines, including Bollywood star Priyanka Chopra, who could've been better utilized in the movie.

Baywatch aims for self-referential, meta humour in a similar vein to 21 Jump Street, which I guess is only funny if you've seen the TV show. But 21 Jump Street didn't just reference the show for laughs, it also satirized genre conventions to make it more accessible for non-fans. Apart from meta humour, Baywatch aims for American Pie-style shock humour, which has become pretty stale and tiresome at this point. There's a scene at the morgue where Zac Efron comes into contact with a dead body's penis, and they draw out that joke for far too long.

Even the cameos were uninspiring. Pamela Anderson didn't even have a line, and David Hasselhoff had a better cameo in Guardians of the Galaxy 2. Even if you didn't know there were going to be cameos, Anderson and Hasselhoff are credited at the beginning of the film.

Baywatch isn't a bad film (even though it was supposed to be), but the action scenes were boring and the green screen effects were terrible. There's a scene where the Baywatch lifeguards have to save a couple of party girls from a burning boat, and the flames couldn't look anymore rubbish. Even if you didn't know it was filmed in front of a green screen (which couldn't be more obvious), the movie even has outtakes with Efron and Johnson in front of a green screen, and even the outtakes weren't very fun to watch. And if you're only interested in Baywatch for the babes, the lack of cleavage would have you wishing you was watching porn.