For adolescent Indian boys growing up in the ’90s without Internet but with overflowing hormones, Baywatch was the go-to programme on TV. Pamela Anderson in all her buxom glory running on the golden beaches in super slow motion was an image so hypnotic that things like plot, character, acting, etc simply got knocked off! David Hasselhoff running around in red shorts took care of the female attention.
All these years later, Hollywood has “jumped” on to the old-TV-new-movie adaptation “street” trying to reprise the same jigglefest in spandex. Hot bods prancing up and down the beach and in the name of saving people from drowning, investigating drug dealing and murders. Vomitting the pool green, getting a pecker stuck in a beach chair, playing around with dead men’s testicles... Baywatch is a Sajid Khan movie on Xanax.
The whole premise of lifeguards trying to be detectives is so insanely ridiculous — “it sounds like an entertaining (but) far-fetched TV show” — that it’s very difficult to dive into the plot and there’s a lot of plotting for what is really a stupid sex comedy. Mitch (Dwayne Johnson) is the superhero lifeguard at the Emerald Bay with 500 career saves — “Batman, but bigger” — and he has his beach vaanar sena, with a new CJ Parker (Kelly Rohrbach) and a new Stephanie Holden (Ilfenesh Hadera).
Victoria Leeds (our very own Priyanka Chopra) is the owner of the hip and happening Huntley Club but she is actually masterminding some real estate scam and is ordering kidnaps and murders in every scene. Now, Mitch and his girls along with three new recruits, including the Olympic gold medal-winning swimmer Matt Brody (Zac Efron), who’s “on community service”, have to find a way to throw water on her plans.
The scenes are clunky, the acting pedestrian and most of the going-on absolutely preposterous. The seriousness of the plot and the silliness of the comic set-pieces just don’t blend and they all blow up in the night sky in a climactic action finale which is more of a whimper than a roar.
The only redeeming qualities about the film? The Rock and Piggychops. Johnson doesn’t only bring his starry thunder to what is otherwise a bland bunch of abs and curves, he brings genuine warmth and affection lending that much-needed family feeling among the lifeguards. He is also hilarious in his banter with Efron, cutting his super-sized ego down with lines like “Listen to me, High School Musical” or “Hey One Direction!”
Priyanka as the bewitching baddie looks stunning in each of her scenes and not just the one in which her cleavage goes bungee-jumping. But more importantly, she knows how to handle the confused tone of the film, adding just the right amount of over-the-top flair to her dialogue delivery and body language. She has a similar role to Aishwarya Rai’s Pink Panther outing and PC does so much better, not looking doltish at any point of time.
But the film’s so dead in the water that not even special appearances by Anderson and Hasselhoff can resuscitate the magic. It would be so much better to see them running in their reds in old grainy YouTube videos. Our original slo-mo heroes.
Pratim D. Gupta
SLEAZY AND WHOLESOME, SILLY AND EARNEST, DUMB AS A BOX OF SAND AND SLYLY SELF-AWARE
In case the question should ever arise on a standardised test, the opposite of “prestige TV” is Baywatch. The series, which ran on NBC and in ubiquitous syndication through the 1990s, bequeathed a rich legacy of wet-suit fashion, Jet Ski safety and sunscreen awareness. In other news, Paramount has just released a movie called Baywatch, starring Dwayne Johnson in the role of the beach daddy originated by David Hasselhoff.
The film, directed by Seth Gordon (Identity Thief, Horrible Bosses), can be viewed from several perspectives, most notably the abdominal, the pectoral and the gluteal. If torsos and tails are not your thing, other aspects of human anatomy are also available for study. Arms and legs, for example. But though acres of flesh are exposed to view — most of it pleasingly sculpted — there is very little outright nudity and no sex to speak of.
You will, however, witness some rude and suggestive sight gags and an extended sequence in a morgue involving the genitals of a dead man. Those bits, and the energetic profanity in the script (written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift), represent cosmetic alterations intended to secure an R-rating, at the moment a mark of credibility in the world of big-screen comedy.
Make no mistake, though: The project’s essential network prime-time DNA remains intact. Like its source material, Baywatch is sleazy and wholesome, silly and earnest, dumb as a box of sand and slyly self-aware. It’s soft-serve ice cream. Crinkle-cut fries. A hot car and a skin rash. Tacky and phony and nasty and also kind of fun.
Not everything is surf and sand and eye candy, though. A movie requires a plot or five, and Baywatch barrels through enough action and story to fill a couple of hours. Mitch Buchannon (Johnson) is the guru and patriarch of a squad of lifeguards — a “family”, as every franchise team in this fast and furious age must be called. The other principal members are C. J. (Kelly Rohrbach) and Stephanie (Ilfenesh Hadera). They must supervise three trainees: Summer (Alexandra Daddario), Ronnie (Jon Bass) and Matt (Zac Efron, looking uncannily like a young, ripped and shrunken Hasselhoff).
Matt is a gold-medal-winning Olympic swimmer in disgrace, a bad boy in need of reforming. Ronnie is a pudgy nerd, with tech-geek skills and a brain-melting crush on C. J. Summer is there for Matt to ogle and flirt with, and to attest to the screenwriters’ utter inability to make a woman in a bathing suit an interesting character. Efron and Johnson are permitted to be funny and look sexy in their swimwear. The women mostly run to the rescue in their zippered one-pieces.
A partial exception is Priyanka Chopra, who appears not in a bathing suit but in a succession of slinky dresses that signify — along with her purring diction, her muscle-headed minions and her collection of champagne flutes and martini glasses — her character’s supervillain status. That character, Victoria Leeds, is a drug dealer and would-be real estate mogul whose machinations threaten the Bay. And the only people with the integrity, gumption and sleuthing skills to save it are Mitch and his lifeguards. The Bay is their life, after all.
For anyone contemplating the purchase of a ticket, the stakes are quite a bit lower. Baywatch, which, incidentally, features Johnson’s most credible acting since The Tooth Fairy, slots neatly into a subgenre that is perhaps too sloppy to have a name. But if you enjoy the 21 Jump Street or Ride Along franchises, you won’t have too bad a time. The soundtrack hums with well-chosen, not-too-obvious hip-hop, R&B and rock classics; the humour is knowing and naughty without risking serious offence; and an inclusive brand of meta-ness is practiced. You don’t need to be privy to any particular Baywatch lore to get the jokes, and you’ll see a few nimble comic performers (Hannibal Buress, Yahya Abdul-Matteen II) in too-small roles.
You shouldn’t expect much in the way of cinema. The digital effects — fire and water, mostly — are lacklustre, and the whole thing has a crummy, overcast, second-rate-theme-park look to it. Except for the bodies, of course, which are really all you came to see in the first place.
A.O. Scott
(The New York Times News Service)
