By Baywatch is another film in the same vein of nostalgic television reboots like The A-Team, CHiPs, and the crazily successful 21 Jump Street. A show known only for attractive people running in slow motion serving as a sort of softcore adult entertainment before the advent of actual pornography. When you take the framework of something so banal as this, what can you do?
Baywatch answers this question with a hearty “nothing.” Cribbing a bit of the meta-humor which made 21 Jump Street so popular, but having none of the material to back it up, this film tests the limits of how much someone will be willing to laugh a dick joke. In a weird stasis between playing its premise too straight, and making fun of itself, Baywatch lands itself in some pretty hot water.
No matter how much you may enjoy staring at the screen, you’ll get the same amount of substance from just googling “Zac Efron abs.”
Baywatch
Director: Seth Gordon
Release Date: May 26, 2017
Rated: R
Mitch (Dwayne Johnson) is a lifeguard everyone loves. He may take his job a bit too seriously, but in the world of Baywatch, his lifeguard post includes its own arm of the local government (complete with enough of a budget to afford things like ATVs). When confronted with the disgraced, former Olympian Matt Brody (Zac Efron), he’s forced to put his feelings about the new recruit aside when they uncover a larger drug plot at hand that’s threatening the entire bay. But when the police won’t investigate, Lt. Mitch and his lifeguard crew decide to take matters into their own hands and dicks and boobs.
Like most unfortunate comedies to fall in this category, Baywatch substitutes actual jokes with raunchy humor. Now I don’t have a problem with raunch in practice, as dick jokes are as classic as apple pie, but they’re only great when they don’t disrupt the flow of the film. It’s hard to explain, but I’ll try and elaborate on my problem with Baywatch‘s genitalia humor by outlining one of its more problematic scenes. In the first fifteen minutes or so, Ronnie (Jon Bass), the archetypal loser of the bunch, has a crush on the lifeguard CJ (Kelly Rohrback) — who’s only purpose in this film is to be ogled — and chokes on some food when she runs by. After CJ delivers the heimlich maneuver (complete with thrusting), Ronnie becomes erect. But to hide it from her, he nervously stumbles until he falls and gets stuck, dick first, in a beach chair. Thus resulting in a large crowd of people surrounding Ronnie as CJ and Mitch talk about setting him free. If it sounds like my summary made the scene seem devoid of charm, it was actually much worse experiencing it first hand. Sure it serves the purpose of introducing Ronnie and CJ’s dynamic, but paints their friendship in an unpleasant, slog of a light.
It’s a shame Baywatch relies so much on low hanging fruit humor, since it can be intelligent when it puts forth an effort. When the film allows itself to be made fun of, it actually makes for pretty fantastic sequences. The film’s opening, for example, combines all that you’d expect to see (Johnson diving in slow motion, wide shots of the beach) but injects with a major nod to how ridiculous it all is once the title card shows up. There are even a few inspired raunchy bits (like the talking balls gag), and the fact that Mitch never refers to Brody by his real name. These occasional bright spots in the dialogue only make the rest of the script more disappointing by comparison.
But the major factor at play is how straight it plays the premise. Baywatch, while occasionally winking at itself, also takes things much more seriously than you’d hope. Long stretches are dedicated to plot exposition, or un-interestingly shot action sequences. Rather than laugh, or even question what I was watching, I often found myself having no reaction at all. And with a comedy that clocks in at two hours, that’s pretty much the equivalent of drowning in shallow water. It’s something that could’ve easily been avoided had you tried to kick around a bit.
Like the vapid characters of its source material, Baywatch is great to look at but once it opens its mouth you realize how hollow it is. It’s almost as if the entire film plays in slow motion.
Baywatch is a bad watch. I know I should feel guilty about not ending this review on a better joke, but that’d mean putting in more effort than the film did.