Baywatch

Great satisfaction on my part as Baywatch lived up to all my expectations. Humor, finally improved by the R-rating, actually only works when Rock or Efron are on screen, the rest of the jokes just don’t land. Slow-motion shots of girls in swimsuits, a relaxed atmosphere, punchy one-liners, some seriously crude moments, pathetic acting performances by certain people and, most importantly, a completely deliberate self-parody that is spot-on. After all those bad reviews and pessimistic expectations, I definitely give it a thumbs up. (01/09/2017)

Sure, it's a terrible piece of crap, but I got exactly what I expected from this movie. It's sometimes ridiculously silly, sometimes ridiculously cool; there are great actors whom I like, beautiful women who made my jaw drop; there's the ability to make fun of oneself and the original series, and damn it, there's even Hasselhoff and Pamela. That's all I needed. (22/08/2017)

When the muscular men aren’t diving into the water in slow motion and the beautiful women aren’t emerging from the water in slow motion (the film never rises above the level of how male and female bodies are depicted in subverting gender stereotypes), two or more characters stand/sit on the beach and, in unimaginatively shot scenes, spend a tiresomely long time dragging out an adolescent joke about, for example, the age of Efron’s character (“Where did you come from, One Direction?”) or a sidekick’s inability to form an articulate thought when coming face to face with a person of the opposite sex. As a star vehicle for Dwayne Johnson, this two-hour celebration of virility and heroism based more on physical strength than on intellect works particularly well when it exaggerates the protagonist’s perfection to the edge of deliberate parody. Unfortunately, it does so by repeatedly using the same template, with a laziness that is characteristic of how the whole film is written (piling up supposedly humorous asides instead of developing the joke) and directed (poor timing of the bumbling action scenes). In the second half, which is mostly focused on a rather insipid crime plot (serving mainly as an excuse for The Rock to punch someone in the mouth), the film is not only short on humour (rather, it is unironically affected), but it also runs out of ideas, loses pace and doesn’t have a proper build-up. Among other things, this is due to the fact that the main star disappears from the film for quite a long time, thus taking away the only reason to suffer through this comedy targeted mainly at boys under the age 15 (and apparently written by people of the same age and gender). 40% (15/06/2017)

I can endure a lot. I don't have any particularly nostalgic relationship with the original phenomenon Baywatch, and I always appreciate Priyanka Chopra as a villain. But this film doesn't make sense even in the series of the strange "comedies with Dwayne Johnson" subgenre. There is nothing more here than a bit of humor for tweens and completely botched cameos by David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson. (11/08/2023)

It really is THAT bad, which is a pity. If it turned out to be a toilet-humor comedy, as was suggested by the ludicrous stuck d*ck scene at the beginning, it could have been fun. But nothing works here, and given the two-hour runtime (and its creators’ increasing inability to keep at least one aspect of the movie together), you’ll suffer through it. Not even the cameos of David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson are used in any creative or funny way. And that’s just a few seconds of this thing! (18/06/2017)