Baywatch — Review

You hear that sound, boys and girls? That’s the bottom of the barrel being scraped. Actually by now that barrel may have given way and we’re actually just mining the dirt. That is to say, I feel like, oddly enough, if producers had pitched a ‘Baywatch’ movie during the height of the show’s popularity 20-something years ago, they’d have been laughed at. But now, with the model of movies like ‘Starsky & Hutch’ and ‘21 Jump Street,’ which address their cheesy source material simply by making fun of it, I guess it’s not too hard to sell anything with the slightest hint of name recognition.

So given the year it is, I guess ‘Baywatch’ is pretty much what you’d expect. We still get the pretty girls with the slow-motion boobs, the muscular dudes (also sometimes in slow-mo), and there’s even a goofy chubby guy on the team lest you think the film too sincere in delivering the series’ signature goods. The disappointing thing to report here is that the movie (directed by Seth Gordon, who also helmed the pretty funny if forgettable ‘Horrible Bosses’) is criminally short on real laughter. I wish I could tell you they were trying, but most of the lazy humor on display (the chubby guy gets his junk caught in a beach chair while he’s talking to his crush; Zac Efron disguises himself as a woman to fool the bad guys and Dwayne Johnson implies he might be enjoying it — how controversial!) plays like it could have been written for a direct-to-video ‘American Pie’ spinoff ten years ago.