Movie Reaction: Baywatch

Formula: 21 Jump Street - the commitment to the jokes.

Before talking about the Baywatch movie, it's good to remind yourself of what this is based on. Baywatch was a 90s beach series that was cancelled by NBC after one season then went on to become a global phenomenon producing the next 10 seasons in syndication. It rejuvinated the career of David Hasselhoff and made Pamela Anderson the sex icon of the 90s. It was known for sexy lifeguards running in slow-motion and not much else. The number of cast members that also had Playboy pictorials is mind boggling. I don't think there's a person alive who watched the show for the writing or acting. In other words, the Baywatch movie haa very little to live up to.

That's why the 21 Jump Street comparison is so obvious. Both shows are from the same era and are remembered as punchlines. The 21 Jump Street movie came out of nowhere as one of the funniest movies of the last few years by casting some recognizable names and not taking itself at all seriously. Baywatch takes a different approach. It decides that it is a cool action movie first and a meta comedy second.

The plot is pretty simple. The veteran lifeguards, affable Lt. Mitch Buchannon (Dwayne Johnson), 2nd-in-command Stephanie Holden (Ilfenesh Hadera), and always-running-in-slow-motion CJ Parker (Kelly Rohrbach) welcome a new batch of recruits: defiant bad boy Matt Brody (Zac Effron), ideal pupil Summer Quinn (Alexandra Daddario), and perseverant goof Ronnie Greenbaum (Jon Bass). They get caught up trying to stop a drug operation run by one of the resort owners (Priyanka Chopra). Mitch and Matt butt heads. Ronnie has a crush on CJ. Matt and Summer are probably going to end up together. There's a captain telling them all to leave the case alone (because they are lifeguards, not cops). The movie is happy to constantly remind us of how absurd they are all being. The film repeatedly winks at the camera to tell us "We know this is ridiculous too". The problem is that it tries to have its cake and eat it too. Whenever the action starts, the comedy stops. In an instant, these lifeguards become the baddest mother-fuckers on the planet. I think the defense of doing that is that in those moments, the joke is that the movie is taking itself seriously, whereas the rest of the time it's being overly funny. In other words, half of this movie is 21 Jump Street and half of it is Airplane. Those two things don't jive. It's a brilliant built-in defense for the writing though: when a scene is funny, it's because it was meant to be funny. and when a scene isn't funny, it's because the joke is that it's not funny. 

There's a shocking number of punchlines that don't land. And, I don't mean that there's a lot of bad punchlines. I mean that there's a number of moments in which the line indicates that there's a joke, but the film doesn't leave a beat to punctuate the moment with laughter. Either it moves to a new scene before the joke can sink in or the scene continues like that wasn't a joke.  It's bizarre. I can't think of another movie with quite that problem.

I don't know how much of that to put on the cast either. It's no secret that this cast wasn't built for comedy. However, that doesn't mean they can't be funny. I go out of my way whenever I can to praise Johnson and Efron for giving it all they have in comedies like Pain & Gain and Central Intelligence or Neighbors and Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates. They aren't self-starters though. And, they play the same role in a comedy duo. They perform comedy like they are trying to be funny. There needs people to be someone who knows how to play-off that and there's no one like that in the cast. Bass isn't paired with anyone for laughs. He spends most of the film in his own world, delivering punchlines to thin air. That's fine, but it doesn't help the ensemble. I think Rohrbach, Hadera, and especially Daddario have chops, but they aren't asked to do much more than look good in bathing suits. I think all of them have the potential to be really good in a comedy movie (some already have been). In this case, they were failed by the writing and a questionable casting strategy. Perhaps the directing too. There just isn't a lot I found redeeming about this film. It's like the six credited writers (screenplay or story by) wrote jokes for completely different comedy movies, then director Seth Gordon was told to shoot a serious action movie, and the actors were told to split the difference.

I went into Baywatch prepared to give a contrarian Reaction for it, despite the poor RottenTomatoes numbers. I was going to find the silver lining and say things like "The Rock made his part work by force of will" or "Efron and Daddario have such an infectious chemistry that it didn't matter if the jokes didn't always land". I wanted to admit that if I stopped comparing it to 21 Jump Street, I'd see that there's a perfectly fine comedy there. All that is a little true. It's not unwatchable by any means. There's some dick humor that other people in the audience got a big kick out of. I just don't think the film was very interested in being a comedy, and it doesn't work well enough as anything else to forgive that.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend