Too Bad No One Could Save Baywatch

'Did it have to be this inane?'
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted May 26, 2017 8:48 AM CDT

Apparently Baywatch should have stayed off the big screen. Though audiences appear to mildly enjoy director Seth Gordon's big-screen revamp, giving it a 62% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, critics are drowning it in bad reviews for a 19% rating. Here's what they're saying:

  • "A Baywatch movie needn't be high art—its TV inspiration certainly wasn't—but did it have to be this inane?" asks Brian Lowry at CNN. He claims you'd have about as much luck finding a lost item buried in sand as you would finding a laugh in this movie. As for those beach babes, they're "skimpy compensation to justify a water-logged trip back to the beach that, the Rock notwithstanding, sinks like a stone."
  • It works for the first half-hour or so thanks to Zac Efron and Dwayne Johnson's "playful chemistry," but then it starts to drown. And sadly, "Baywatch can't rescue itself from a puddle," writes Adam Graham at Detroit News. It "wants to be smart-dumb, but winds up being dumb-dumb … a few funnies, some tanned, toned bodies and a half-baked plot." But then, this is Baywatch. "What did you expect?"

  • Yes, it's "lightweight, a tiny bit crude and a trillion grains of sand away from anything approaching realism. But it's also a lot of fun," Stephanie Zacharek writes at Time. The jokes—which are, perhaps surprisingly, not made at the expense of female characters—are "plain dumb," but still generate a laugh, she writes. Plus, it's hard not to enjoy all the beautiful people. "You could do worse," Zacharek concludes.
  • Bruce Demara wholeheartedly disagrees. This is a movie for "immature, socially maladjusted males." For everyone else, "even sand in your shorts would be less annoying," he writes at the Toronto Star. There's no true connection to the TV series, the plot is ridiculous, the scenes are too long, and the actors … well, Efron "is just plain bad," and even Johnson is "not particularly appealing," Demara writes. "Give this one a pass."
(More movie review stories.)

Get the news faster.
Tap to install our app.
X
Install the Newser News app
in two easy steps:
1. Tap in your navigation bar.
2. Tap to Add to Home Screen.

X