Baywatch

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)

Testosterone and silicone packed and a pointlessly long showcase of boorish humour worthy only of the popular four letter swear word. I saw (or wished to see) great potential in it, but instead of the creators casually poking fun at the show's naive stupidity and showering us with catchphrases and cameos for an hour and a half, they oscillate for two hours on the surface of a dull detective plot and the most cringeworthy buddy comedy ever to hit theatres. If Johnson had been alive in the 1950s, he would have played at most the second henchman to the bad guy in an Ed Wood movie; today, his iconisation subordinates the entire narrative of a presumed hit that could have had such an all-encompassing parodic feel. Ironically, it's his few scenes with the heartthrob Efron that keep it afloat, at least on the level of episodic humour. This has failed miserably, with only the physical equipment of Alexandra Daddario asking for a much better hit – inaccessible of course. 40% (13/11/2017)

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)

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)

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)