Let's be honest here, the premise of life guards doing detective work and solving crimes is absolutely ridiculous, and should not be taken seriously at all. If you want to fault the movie for being an illogical mess, then you have some ground to stand on, however I'm pretty sure it doesn't care that it doesn't really make sense. As a re-imagining of the hit TV series of the same name, Baywatch made the right choice of embracing the inherently silly premise, and set forth to just entertain us with it's comedic take of it. Did it succeed? As subjective an answer as I can give, I will say that I was definitely entertained.
The self-aware comedic bits I thought were very entertaining. References to the original TV show like slow-motion running, to making joke set pieces of familiar plot tropes like our characters needing to go undercover, were pretty enjoyable to see. Some of the jokes were simply hit or miss. Some were laugh out loud funny. Most however were just tongue-in-cheek funny. I think this movie would have been more enjoyable if it really went for broke with it's comedy, but it seemed to want to also be the exact generic action/adventure TV show that it is making fun of, which unfortunately just gave us some comedic lulls that just slowed things down.
What really helped this movie however, are the characters. The contentious chemistry between the characters of Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron was a lot of fun to watch, and is arguably the main reason to see this movie. Jon Bass as Ronnie is also a nice surprising highlight as the primary comedic relief of the group, and his interactions with Kelly Rohrbach as CJ Parker just put a huge smile on my face. It would have been nice if the movie gave Alexandra Daddario and Ilfenesh Hadera more things to do with their characters though.
When watching Baywatch, there's a certain feeling of it being just acceptably serviceable as a comedy, which admittedly isn't that big of a compliment. The enjoyable fun factor is there, but it's not as memorably funny as it probably should have been. Despite some of the shortcomings mentioned, this cast overall is absolutely very charming to watch, and enough of an excuse to check out this movie anyway.
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