Review of Baywatch (2017) by Glorimar S — 14 Jun 2017

I will give Sausage Party this: it was a dumb movie, but it did have an interesting theme. Baywatch doesn't even have that. It has just about the same level of production value - actually, no, way worse. CGI in SSP makes sense. But the CGI in Baywatch...geeeeeeeeez.

And the green screen??? Even I could tell the backgrounds were fake as fluff and it did take me out of the scene!!!

But how about that recycled plot? Man o MAN was that tiresome. The likeable Rock actually gave me a main character that wasn't very fun or relatable, and Zac Effron was set up as the likeable one, and you watch him be useless and get crapped on for the first two thirds of the movie. It's only at the end that he becomes useful, and the whole dynamics with the team are just soooooooooo forced.

The story is incredibly, criminally dumb. Trust me, I love my stupid action-comedies. XXX: Return of Xander Cage is pure guilty pleasurable fun. The Fate of the Furious uses its knowingly bad qualities and plays them up for goofy effect. But Baywatch does take itself too seriously at times. And the story is just choppy and cliche-ridden and carbon-copied and not well-written at all.

OH yeah, this was advertised as a comedy.

Yeah, it's not a comedy. This is a laugh-absent desert. I may have chuckled once. Maybe.

Snatched was funnier than this. Everything, Everything, a romance, was funnier than this. Shoot, even CHiPS was funnier than this!!! The elements and characters they try to make the funny ones fall flat on their face. The guy who plays the underdog who gets on the team, he's got some chops but he never pulls through here. Pretty much all of the female characters are underwritten. The cop also shows promise, but he's also underwritten! The characters are so bad!!! They're so painstakingly formulaic and uninteresting! They're just pretty faces that are mean and unbearable for much of the movie's runtime. The movie locks in the audience as Effon's character, and since the characters are almost always mad at him and he's often messing up, it's really hard to get into the team dynamic they're tying to push.

Effron is charismatic enough for me to recommend this to fans of him. If you really really love him, then you can live though this one.

Baywatch gets a 2.1 and is a Dieharder's Only choice.