Critics’ Verdict: ‘Baywatch’ Is Vulgarity That Is Far From Funny

Hollywood’s version of cult TV show ‘Baywatch’ turns out to be a big disappointment for critics internationally.

Film: Baywatch
Director: Seth Gordon
Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Zac Efron, Priyanka Chopra, Alexandra Daddario, Pamela Anderson, David Hasselhoff

Excerpts from the international reviews of Baywatch:

Baywatch starring Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron, is a stupidly entertaining trash folly, the kind that could only be made today: an obscenity-and-insult-laced, aggressively “competent” adaptation of a 25-year-old TV show that manages to repackage every aspect of the series except, perhaps, the reason it was popular in the first place. And what was that reason? If Rodney Dangerfield were around, he might say, “There were two reasons!” But actually there’s a bit more to it. Baywatch, as a series, now looks jaw-droppingly goofy and harmless (actually, it did then too), and the movie would have been smart to satirize the show’s innocuous underworld drama and cheeseball male gaze, playing up the dated absurdity of it all. But no: The film’s director, Seth Gordon (“Identity Thief”), and its screenwriters, Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, have glommed Baywatch onto the theme of the moment: namely, that a bunch of good-looking SoCal lifeguards, devoted to keeping their beach a safe cool magical place, are just like — wait for it! — a family.

Owen Gleiberman (Variety)

That the film’s guiding creative ethos was apparently to push the envelope and go for an ‘R’ Rating becomes painfully clear. The endless profusion of F-bombs seems to indicate that the screenwriters must have thought they would be paid per use. The raunchy humor extends to gay-panic gags strangely similar to the ones found in the recent, similarly misbegotten CHIPS; Baywatch strains for a vulgarity that never comes remotely close to being funny. Unless, that is, you find the idea of Zac Efron manipulating a dead man’s genitals hysterical. The film, directed by Seth Gordon (Horrible Bosses, Identity Thief), shows off its big budget with large-scale action sequences — including the team rescuing several scantily clad women from a burning yacht, a Jet Ski chase and Efron causing havoc on a pier while riding a motorcycle — but none of them has much impact.

Frank Scheck (The Hollywood Reporter)

Previous movies based on retro TV shows have taught us, the only way to repackage such brand-name yet dated material is with heavy measures of irony and self-satire. And even then they invariably fail: CHiPs, The Dukes of Hazzard, The A-Team, everything except 21/22 Jump Street, basically. This lacklustre comedy heads off in that direction but it doesn’t have the wit or the stamina to stay afloat. By about halfway in, the gags dry up and the story sinks like an overweight tourist who took a dip too early after the all-you-can-eat surf’n’turf buffet.

Steve Rose (The Guardian)

As a TV show in the Nineties, Baywatch became a worldwide phenomenon, a kitsch classic serving up sun, semi-naked beauties and very silly storylines. It was the stuff of teenage fantasies, so fixated was it with bums and boobs, jiggling away in sleazy slow-mo. As a film, it takes all these elements and jacks them up with steroids and machismo. Everything about Baywatch the movie is big, brash and bombastic. The plot, about an Indian gangster queen (Priyanka Chopra) importing drugs along the coast, is wafer-thin and perfunctory at best. And yet, somehow, Gordon stretches the movie’s running time to two hours, beefing it up with a fatuous romantic subplot and not one, but two heinously long-winded penile gags ripped straight from the Farrelly brothers’ textbook of gross-out comedy. The women, meanwhile, are there purely to up the film’s phwoar factor: Kelly Rohrbach as CJ Parker and Alexandra Daddario as Summer Quinn wink and nudge but still say – and wear – very little.

Patrick Smith (The Telegraph)