BAYWATCH

It's fair to say that Baywatch was never a great television show. Sure, it was popular but for reasons very different to it actually being a quality show. It was trashy as hell and combined slow-motion with a number of scantily clad supermodels running down the beach in bathing suits so no surprises at all that it attracted viewers. 

There seems to be a bit of a trend in reviving franchises that were popular back in the 80s and 90s, and right now, it was the turn of Baywatch. Quite why is something that I'm still scratching my head about.

When Mitch Buchanan (Dwayne Johnson) butts heads with new recruit Matt Brody (Zac Efron) over how to run Baywatch, they uncover a local criminal plot that threatens the future of the bay. 

As soon as the film started and we see Dwayne Johnson saving someone before Baywatch rises from the sea in giant letters behind him, I immediately thought this was going to be exactly what a Baywatch film should be if it was to be successful. A self aware comedy made as a parody of the show, in the same way that made the Jump Street films such a critical and financial success.

We get flashes of that formula however, for the most part, Baywatch is just an awful film. Painfully unfunny and not one memorable action sequence means it utterly fails as the action comedy it set out to be, and with a runtime of two hours it becomes one hell of a slog to sit through. 

I tried to enjoy it and take it for what it is but the problem is I just can't do that when there seems to be no effort into making the film funny, particularly when watching a comedy. Literally every other joke is a dick joke, including an overly long joke about one of the new recruits getting their dick stuck in a deck chair. I knew it was going to be silly and I didn't have high expectations at all but sadly they weren't even met.

Coming to the performances, Baywatch is absolutely lifeless. Even Dwayne Johnson or Zac Efron, who has shown good comedic timing before, can't save this from becoming the absolute car wreck that it is. Alexandra Daddario, Kelly Rohrbach and Ilfenesh Hadera are sure nice to look at but the film fails them totally in giving them anything interesting to do, Daddario in particular who is actually quite a talented actress. Then there is Jon Bass who delivers an irritant of a performance as he hopelessly lusts after Rohrbach's CJ Parker. I felt embarrassed for them as they had to perform such a terrible script.

I won't even waste time in talking about the pathetic cameo that David Hasselhoff makes in the film. All I will say is what a waste of a cameo that had much better potential if they'd actually stopped to think about it. 

So there you have it, Baywatch is an awful film that fails as both an action and a comedy. It's already one of the worst films I've seen this year and I won't be surprised if it's still up there come the year's end.

Verdict: ★