Baywatch has arrived in theaters and to put it simply, those are two hours of your life you will never ever be able to reclaim. The Zac Efron and Dwayne Johnson starring reboot of the popular 90s television series has so many problems — it is hard to know where to start.
This writer can usually find something enjoyable in almost any cinematic experience. Sadly with Baywatch, it has not one redeeming quality. The film has a script that felt like it was penned by a fifth grader with such gaping holes in credibility strewn throughout that jaws were dropped almost every five-to-ten minutes with the most inane of plot movements that could easily have been fixed with a little bit of finesse.
The battle over the Bay is supposed to be between good and evil. The protagonists are the Baywatch lifeguards and the antagonist is embodied by Priyanka Chopra, a hotelier who just might be using the bay to bring in drugs to distribute and ruin lives. Our main hero is Johnson’s Mitch Buchannon. He’s Mr. Lifesaver with so many saves it’s hard to keep track. But as we learn as the film commences, everyone he meets on the beach has either been saved by him or knows someone saved by him. See, it’s that kind of simplistic ridiculousness that is utterly distracting from the get-go.
His boss, Captain Thorpe (Rob Huebel), brings in a rebellious potential lifeguard in Zac Efron’s two-time gold medal winning swimmer Matt Brody. As part of his parole deal, he has to serve as a lifeguard (again, ridiculous). Brody is clearly a Ryan Lochte inspired goof who scored gold on his own, but failed his teammates in the relays. Brody and Buchannon but heads, names are called and we all know the former will come around just when the plot needs him to, to help crack the case and put the bad guys (or in this case, girl) in the slammer.
Filling out the team in this TV to big screen effort are lifeguard pros CJ Parker (Kelly Rohrbach) and Ilfenesh Hadera’s Stephanie Holden. Johnson’s San Andreas onscreen daughter Alexandra Daddario is Summer Quinn, who is joined in the lifeguard training program by Jon Boss’ Ronnie Greenbaum and of course Efron, who doesn’t believe he needs to be a plebe to anyone, given his stature as a medal-winning Olympian (more drama ensues from that predictable setup). As the bodies start to pile up on the beach and the cops don’t seem to be able to handle the most simple of tasks, our lifeguards swing into action and take it upon themselves to crack this case wide open.
It includes ludicrous moments like the gang discovering that a city councilman did not in fact die on a boat fire. See, Johnson, Daddario and Efron break into the morgue and see the Medical Examiner’s report and discover there is no smoke in his lungs and his neck was broken in six places. Um, wouldn’t the cops have noticed that? And what about that scene where a cell phone with evidence is broken in half and all hope is lost that the video of the villains explaining their crimes will ever see the day? Um, has anyone in this world heard of a SIM card?!
See, Baywatch appears to have been written by a fifth grader. The above are merely two examples of how incredibly astonishingly awful the plot movement is throughout. There are dozens upon dozens of moments that are as bad, if not worse than the two we mentioned.
Actually the film was penned by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift (with writer credits that spread to seven people!). One would think that a single person among that septuplet group of creative types would have found a better way to orchestrate a final confrontation between our heroes and villains than to have them walk onto a private yacht party thrown by Chopra — without invitations no less (even fist bumping the bouncer on the way in while hip hop music plays on the soundtrack) — and move throughout the party gathering evidence of a crime they believe is being committed. Of course, this all while the local police seem to be keystone copping it in their effort to bring justice to the bay.
Efron, Johnson and the entire team do their best. But a miracle worker could not make magic out of muck. We will say that Efron and Johnson have solid cinematic camaraderie and perhaps one day they will get a project worthy of their charms. Director Seth Gordon (Horrible Bosses) doesn’t help things when he lets this amateur hour production steamroll to its predictable and eye-rolling conclusion that will have audiences uttering no laughs, and in fact, more likely eliciting a chorus of painful groans.
Grade: F