BEFORE: I would have preferred to watch a film like this during beach season, but I just couldn't break up the set. Dwayne Johnson carries over again from "Skyscraper", and I'm halfway through his 8-film chain today.
THE PLOT: Devoted lifeguard Mitch Buchannon butts heads with a brash new recruit as they uncover a criminal plot that threatens the future of the bay.
AFTER: Look, I'm all for recycling, but rebooting a classic TV show into a movie rarely works - remember the movie versions of "The Dukes of Hazzard", "Get Smart", "CHiPs", "Dragnet" and "Get Smart"? OK, once in a while it works, like with "Mission: Impossible" or "Miami Vice", but for every one of those, there are five more that turn out like "Bewitched" or "Wild Wild West". I think to stand out a movie re-boot of a show has to really up the ante, like "The Untouchables", or go totally into parody-mode, like "Dragnet". This one attempted to do both, thus producing a convoluted mess that couldn't seem to decide which it wanted to be.
Casting "The Rock" was a great idea, because he ended up sharing something with Hasselhoff's TV version of Mitch Buchannon, both actors have this sort of "aw, shucks" over-sincerity that allows them to seem on the level even when the dialogue is super-corny. Like, you can't believe that a straight-arrow character could act any straighter than them. It's like a super-strong sense of self or something, even though people have been making jokes about Hasselhoff for years, he just took it all in stride, probably because he was laughing all the way to the bank, while playing super-corny and simplistic characters like Mitch or Michael Knight.
For contrast, they threw in Zac Efron (hey, another short guy to make Dwayne Johnson look bigger, though he does have a lot of muscles himself) to play a take on a Ryan Lochte swimmer - someone who won some Olympic medals, but got in trouble for partying, failed his team and now has to do some form of community service, so he figured why not be a lifeguard? The main problem is, he's not a team player, and the Baywatch crew is all about working together as a unit and having each other's backs. So he butts heads with Mitch Buchannon at first, and it takes a long time to break him into someone who can properly be mentored.
What's weird is that Mitch's old mentor shows up, and that character is played by Hasselhoff, aka the old Mitch Buchannon, which we all know, but the Hoff's character isn't given a name here, because that would be too confusing - like, who's the REAL Mitch, and how can there be two? OK, I guess that makes sense, because you want to pay tribute to the old show while still moving the movie franchise forward. But then Pamela Anderson shows up at the end, and she plays a version of her old character, "Casey Jean Parker". However, they cast a new actress as "CJ Parker", so how can this be? You can't have two characters with the same name like this, it's not "Into the Baywatch-verse" where there are 5 different Peter Parkers (and a Peter Porker) from all-different realities working together!
I suppose it's another example of how this film doesn't even try to take itself seriously, not at all. There's a new designer drug going around on the beach, there's some kind of real-estate takeover happening, and city council members are turning up dead, one by one. By all means, send in the lifeguards, even though they're not police or DEA agents or trained to deal with political corruption in any way. The movie points this out, again and again, for comic effect, but that doesn't negate the fact that the Baywatch team is completely out of their jurisdiction, most of the time. I never watched the TV show, but I'm guessing that it slowly devolved from a beach rescue show into something closer to a crime procedural, am I right?
But even I knew that the TV show "Baywatch" was set in California (and in Hawaii in the later seasons, it turns out) so why set the movie in Florida? Does that help with the double role thing, like is Hasselhoff the Californian Mitch Buchannon, and Dwayne Johnson runs the Florida franchise? This setting just made me realize the similarities to "Reno 911!: Miami", which also had corrupt council members and drug dealers, and also had Dwayne Johnson in a cameo role. (Ah, may be it's not just me - Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant from "Reno 911" were two of this film's screenwriters...)
Wow, two contenders for the Golden Raspberry Worst Movie award in one week - but different years, this one was nominated in 2017 and "The Happytime Murders" was a contender in 2017. (Other nominees for this "honor" I've watched this year include "Robin Hood", "Swept Away" and "Movie 43", and I've still got "Holmes & Watson" to go...)
Also starring Zac Efron (last seen in "The Paperboy"), Priyanka Chopra (last heard in "Planes"), Alexandra Daddario (last seen in "The House"), Rob Huebel (ditto), Jon Bass (last seen in "Molly's Game"), Hannibal Buress (last seen in "Tag"), Kelly Rohrbach, Ilfenesh Hadera, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (last seen in "Aquaman"), Oscar Nunez (last seen in "Mascots"), Amin Joseph, Jack Kesy (last seen in "12 Strong"), with cameos from David Hasselhoff (last seen in "The Last Laugh"), Pamela Anderson (last seen in "Superhero Movie"), Samantha Harris.
RATING: 4 out of 10 slow-motion shots
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