Movie Review: Baywatch
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Remember the television series from a few decades ago that was so shallow, so frivolous, and so disposable that you knew it would never, ever, ever possibly turn up as a movie, even though virtually everything on the tube eventually turns up as a movie?
Well, so much for common knowledge: Baywatch is a movie.
And the funny thing is, it's not half-bad.
Well, wait a second: yes, it is half-bad. Which also makes it half-good.
That's because it's been substantially modified, its limitations and indulgences acknowledged and adjusted.
It's now a big-screen action comedy based on the TV series that ran from 1989 to 2001 in which everything was secondary to scantily clad bodies on display on a California beach who spent much if not most of their time running in re-e-e-eal slo-o-o-ow motion.
That used to be the province of star and producer David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson, whom the show made famous. Both turn up in brief cameos.
Now director Seth Gordon (Horrible Bosses, Four Christmases, Identity Thief), who over does the overwrought CGI-fueled action scenes to an annoying degree, has employed half-a-dozen screenwriters to fashion a story and screenplay with a plot, such as it is, about unlikely prospects trying to land jobs alongside the buff bodies already employed as elite lifeguards.
But the expectation that this updated raunchy romp would also find a way to poke well-deserved fun at the original TV series is barely met.
Dwayne Johnson, also a producer, stars in his characteristically likable way as muscle-bound lifeguard Mitch Buchanan, the head of the team mounting their annual recruitment drive, and Zac Efron is new recruit Matt Brody, a disgraced, chip-on-his-shoulder Olympic swimmer who's not exactly a team guy but who would like to land a spot on the team anyway.
The two of them start off antagonistically, of course. But when a dead body is recovered from the ocean and a mysterious supply of drugs washes up on shore, they have to put their personal differences aside and work together to uncover a local criminal plot involving a drug trafficking operation that threatens the future of the bay.
What helps to keep the taste of eye candy from overwhelming everything else – but not by much -- is that both Johnson and Efron possess informed and exact comic timing, not exactly a highlighted feature of the source material, but prominent enough in the movie to deliver the occasional R-rated chuckle.
So we'll be over here swimming toward 2 stars out of 4 for the gratuitously shirtless but not oppressively worthless Baywatch. Hey, at least you look at the bay more than you do at your watch.
