All the best pretty people…..

It’s another Bank holiday weekend in the UK, and as such you will find yourself with an extra day to enjoy yourselves or be stuck in endless traffic. Maybe you’ll be hitting the cinema, of course, and given its release today, Baywatch on the face of it, certainly looked like an interesting proposition. A revival of a TV series in film form, where various attractive lifeguards such as David Hasselhoff handle all sorts of situations, though of course exactly how many people were always drowning during those situations varied. They also tended to move slowly quite a bit as we needed to see the pretty ladies’ boobs move slowly up and down as they ran.

It’s not the first one this year as apparently there was a revival of the TV cop show Chips, which went down as well as the titanic did, taking quite a lot of people with it. But will Baywatch with new pretty people be very Baywatchable or will we be left wanting to be drowned so we were out of our slow motion misery? Having watched it at a preview screening in London, I certainly can indeed answer that for you.In a strange sort of way, I want to preempt myself here, may be just to save you all time. This is one of those films, that if you watch the trailers for it, you’ve pretty much seen the bits worth watching. That already is pretty damning in itself, but perhaps it was always going to be that way?

The film Baywatch takes place on a lovely beach where the sun always shines, the people are always enjoying / drowning themselves and every day, we have our elite lifeguard force keeping Baywatch. This time, they are lead by the lead man of the action hour, fresh from beating up people in Fast and Furious 8; Dwayne Johnson. He’s playing Mitch, the chracter David Hasselhoff did in the TV series, and is joined by various other people who I’ve not seen before. From the beginning, not all is well, as drugs are washing up on the beach near obvious bad guy businesswoman Victoria Leeds’s (played by Priyanka Chopra) beach club.

Oh dear.

This is as fast as they actually move in the film. True story.

Not to worry, after rescuing someone from having their penis being stuck in a sun lounger, The Baywatch team are holding trials for people to join them on lovely adventures when superstar / drunk Olympic gold medalist Matt Brody arrives on the scene (played by an incredibly ripped Zac Efron). Cue life affirming events which slowly reveal how drugs are coming in and how the Baywatch team can only solve the case by being fired in true cop show fashion, even though Zac Efron quite rightly points out all the time that they are not cops and shouldn’t be doing this type of thing.

Now then, I have to say that yes, there are indeed funny bits in the film, which certainly elevated it way over the film Spy which starred Melissa Mccarthy. It was reviewed rather poorly on this blog and I’m in the minority of that view I accept. Since she became Sean Spicer on Saturday Night live, I’m sold on her as a comedian for sure so hopefully in future she will get even better. However, as stated before, a large number of the laughs for Baywatch came from jokes seen in the trailers, which means that you will have seen a lot of the best bits already. Well there’s one bit with the Rock taking Zac Efron’s picture in the morgue…. which you do have to see, it’s funny.

This film also clearly had a budget of about £20 as there are times that the effects are just so poor that a crap YouTuber with a green screen could have done better! The film also went on for far too long and really could have been helped with some more of the scenes ending on the cutting room floor. The ladies are in here mainly for eye candy and don’t really do a huge amount else save for one or two scenes of action.

They even have cameos from the TV series cast and while David Hasselhoff helps the plot along slightly, Pamela Anderson shows up right at the end and slow motions everywhere. Just because. No lines, just there I guess to fill the time? This could actually have skipped the big screen and instead been a TV special where it might have found a better footing. They do make an effort in places and as I said, there were parts I enjoyed with the little jokes here and there (including the “Mitch” in the fish tank, keep an eye out for that) but overall, the best I can say is that this was OK.

But really I was glad when it ended and wouldn’t want to repeat this experience in future.

Best I can say on this one is wait for Netflix / Amazon to have it on as there’s no way I can say this was worth seeing on the big screen. Given how badly this has been received elsewhere too, it’s a shame this didn’t do better as there were points where it was OK. But just OK.