Stretching is good if you’re exercising but not if you’re making movies. “Baywatch” is a sorta-spoof of the television show that has about 30 minutes’ worth of decent material, but then tries to string that out to a two-hour movie. The end result is a flick with a few good laughs and a whole bunch of filler in between.
Dwayne Johnson plays Lieutenant Mitch Buchannon, the veteran leader of the local lifeguard crew. (Motto: “Risking Our Lives and Flexing for $9/hour.”) The running joke is that he takes his job way too seriously, behaving more like a special ops operative than a dude in jams and flipflops.
As the story opens Mitch is recruiting two new spots on the team. Matt Brody (Zac Efron) would seem to be the top candidate, an Olympic swimming star who can cut through the water like nobody else. But he’s also an arrogant ass who disgraced himself and is looking to take the next steps.
Summer (Alexandra Daddario) is the competition he takes a shine too, who’s too smart to fall for his bro-dude antics. Rounding out the cast of contenders is Ronnie (Jon Bass), a schlubby but good-hearted guy who would seem to be a long shot to make the team.
It’s a pretty raunchy affair, with the boys showing off a lot more skin than the girls. The plot is a forgettable lark, something about an evil businesswoman buying up the beach. Mitch and his fellow lifeguards take on the extra duty of solving some murder and fraud in between elliptical workouts.
There’s been a whole slew of old TV shows turned into movie spoofs in recent years. I’m not opposed to the idea, but I can’t think of a one of them that’s been better than mediocre. “Baywatch” doesn’t sink, but it doesn’t exactly swim, either.
Bonus features include an extended version of the film with new and longer scenes, plus four-making of featurettes. They’re only available on the Blu-ray, though, as the DVD edition has none.
I never watched a single episode of the "Baywatch" TV show, or wanted to. They couldn't just have lifeguards resuscitating poor swimmers every week, so they brought in drug dealers, inter-squad passion/spats, earthquakes and even a serial killer to spice things up.
It sounded like a weird amalgam of a crime procedural and fleshfest, complete with the slo-mo running "jiggle cam" that became its signature.
Basically, it was a stripper cop show.
"Baywatch" at least seemed aware of its own silliness, and to the extent possible, embraced it. So the logical thing to do if you were going to make a movie out of it is to spoof the TV version, in the way that "21 Jump Street," “The A Team” and the more recent “CHIPS” did.
(Though perhaps these are not the… best examples.)
Director Seth Gordon, a TV and film comedy veteran (“Identity Thief,” “Horrible Bosses”), and screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift start off reasonably well, gathering together a gaggle of eye-pleasing hardbodies and concocting a bunch of goofy, raunchy scenarios to put them through.
But the film loses steam pretty early, and then hangs around way too long -- nearly two hours. If any movie needed to rock an 82-minute run time, it’s this.
It’s very aware of what it’s trying to do, at least for a while. The actors mock the TV show while paying homage to it. For instance, one of the women questions why it is their familiar fire red one-piece bathing suits ride so far up their rear ends. It makes us faster in the water, or something, the other responds… and we all know it’s the “or something.”
Interestingly, a whole lot more male flesh is on display than female which, other than some cleavage and the aforementioned butt-age, is pretty much kept under wraps. That is largely provided by Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron, two famously buff actors who butter their bread with getting their kits off.
Johnson is built like the former WWE and NFL prospect he was, massive in the Schwarzeneggerian mold. He basically looks like an 18-wheeler encased in flesh. Efron, a former teen idol, seems intent on completely ridding his body of all fat to the point he resembles those “visible man” cut-out models you saw in biology class, where every muscle strand and the guts are naked to the eye.
Apparently, this is considered attractive nowadays. I guess the next step is for people to start making their internal organs visible. Soon there’ll be a market for cosmetic surgery of the liver.
There is one schlubby guy, a new recruit named Ronnie (Jon Bass), because it’s supposed to be funny to have the rippled crew running on the beach together, and here’s this big belly sloshing around in slo-mo. But the movie awards him… other attributes as compensation.
Other newbies to the Baywatch team are Alexandra Daddario as Summer, a tough and smart girl, and Efron as Matt Brody, a former Olympic champion more famous for his out-of-the-pool tomfoolery than his gold medals. Think Ryan Lochte with gastrointestinal issues. He’s cocky as all get-out and must be put in his place, starting with Summer responding to his brodude overtures.
Johnson is Lieutenant Mitch Buchannon, a legend on the beach with hundreds of confirmed saves. One of the running jokes is that Mitch acts like a military special-ops badass -- the exact origin of his rank is nebulous -- and people have to keep reminding him he’s just a lifeguard.
Ilfenesh Hadera plays Stephanie, Mitch’s seasoned and capable #2. Rob Huebel is the jerk suit ostensibly in command. Kelly Rohrbach rounds out the team as CJ, whom Ronnie is smitten with, and she might just have a little smit running the other direction, too.
There’s a plot, but that’s not really the point. Something about a powerful businesswoman buying up beach properties, muscling politicos and offing anyone who gets in the way.
“Baywatch” actually starts out pretty funny and fresh, but they only really had about two solid “SNL” skits worth of material to go on. The rest is unfunny filler. But I guess they spent so much effort trimming the fat from the beach bods, they couldn’t bother to do the same with the script.
"San Andreas" is like a lot of second-tier summer action movies: it's not very original, it's not very smart, it contains several gag-inducing unintentional laugh moments -- yet it'd be unfair to say that it's not breezily entertaining.
It's essentially a remake of "2012" from a few years back, with a natural disaster laying waste to large stretches of populated lands as various groups of people struggle to escape the unfolding mayhem, with ashen-faced scientists popping in occasionally to explain what's going on and warn that the worst is yet to come. It even recycles that movie's story of a divorced couple rekindling their love amidst the chaos.
Hey, I'm sure the millions of dead don't mind their fate if one family is brought back together!!
I admit I've kind of soured on Dwayne Rock's stardom. He showed some sneaky acting chops and deft comedic timing in a few offbeat roles, many of them supporting, but at some point he and his handlers decided he needs to be Schwarzenegger II. It's all popping muscles and post-smash quips these days.
(Though few in Hollywood seem to notice that he's better at invigorating existing film franchises as a sideshow player than his own star vehicles.)
"San Andreas" rehabilitated him a little bit in my estimation. He uses his big soulful eyes more than his swollen body. He plays a dad who's wounded and vulnerable, and just wants to protect his family. It makes him a lot more sympathetic as a character.
He plays Chief Pilot Ray Gaines of the L.A. Fire Department, and as we establish in an opening canyon rescue sequence, he is the best there is at flying choppers and saving lives.
But then a curious thing happens: a rolling wave of dire earthquakes start shaking California to bits, and Ray's first instinct is... to abandon his duties and go rescue his ex-wife and teen daughter instead!
That's right, he flies off in an expensive rescue helicopter that could be saving a bunch of people's lives, and instead rescues his ex-sweetie (Carla Gugino) off the top of a collapsing skyscraper. All the other people in that building trying to survive? Screw them!
Then they fly the chopper for hours north to San Francisco to rescue their daughter. It sputters out, so along the way they also have to steal a truck, a plane and a boat to continue their journey. At no point do they take the initiative to stop and save anyone else. They fly over an inferno of fires, looting and human degradation and Ray looks down and says, "That's Bakersfield," as if that explains everything.
So just so we're all clear, this is a movie about a heroic, superhuman fire/rescue guy who, when the shit really hits the fan, can be totally depended upon to GO AWOL AND OBSTINATELY REFUSE TO DO HIS JOB.
At one point Ray and his wife are cruising through the flooded streets of San Francisco on a boat -- what's an earthquake without a tsunami? -- when they pass by some random guy who also has a boat and is out finding trapped people to rescue. I kept wanting someone to turn to him and say, "Ray, isn't that what YOU'RE supposed to be doing???"
What's really ironic is that the heavy is a super-rich guy (Ioan Gruffudd) who is Ray's ex-wife's new boyfriend, who keeps abandoning people to save his own skin. But if you think about it, that's exactly what Ray does: look after his own personal self-interests rather than working for the greater good. Dang those nefarious 1-percenters.
Alexandra Daddario, with her big blue eyes, copious thigh gap and jiggling assets, plays Blake, who in some geneticist's dream factory is the daughter of Johnson and Gugino. Also tagging along are Hugo Johnstone-Burt and Art Parkinson as a pair of adorable British brothers here to provide classy accents and derring-do. Paul Giamatti plays the scientist, who finds out how to predict earthquakes using "magnetic pole rates," but alas too late to warn anyone.
There are some perilous sequences here and there, often involving people trying to dodge out of the way as buildings collapse around them. The CGI is a bit cut-rate, but gets the job done.
As cinematic fare, "San Andreas" has the same nutritional profile as the stuff out at the concession stand: tasty, empty calories.
The studio would not screen "Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief" for critics here in Indianapolis. It's something that's been happening more and more lately. Once, it was only tiny little indie films. Now, mainstream movies like this are skipped.
In this case, it was especially curious because several weeks ago they contacted several local critics and offered interviews with the cast. We took them up on it -- you can read the Q&A here -- but still no screening. Exasperating.
Usually when a film is not screened, it's because the studio knows it has a dog on its hands. "Percy" is not a dog of a movie; it's actually a pretty good one. It's a pleasant enough action/adventure story for the preteen crowd -- sort of a Greek mythology version of "Harry Potter."
Instead of spells, Percy Jackson (a winning Logan Lerman -- one to watch) and his cohorts have gods for parents: Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Athena, Hermes, etc. This makes them demi-gods -- humans with magical powers.
Percy thinks he's a regular kid with dyslexia and ADHD, a loser whose mother (Catherine Keener) is married to a slob of a step-father. His only friend is Grover (Brandon T. Jackson), a cripple on crutches.
But when minotaurs and furies start materializing out of thin air to attack him, it's a clue that his daddy is actually Poseidon (Kevin McKidd). It seems some miscreant has stolen Zeus' lightning bolt, and he thinks it's Percy. Unless the lightning is returned, the gods of Olympus are going to war.
The movie is based on a popular series of books by Rick Riordan. Screenwriter Craig Titley and kid-centric director Chris Columbus -- who directed the first two "Harry Potter" movies -- aim for a slapdash of PG-rated mayhem mixed in with some Greek Mythology 101.
In their reckoning, the Earth is populated by hundreds of offspring of the gods, who have a tendency to visit and "hook up" with mortals and then skedaddle. Percy and his ilk think they've been abandoned by their parents -- a none-too-subtle metaphor for the divorce epidemic.
Percy is taken to Camp Half-Blood -- think Hogwarts as a summer retreat -- to train and learn about his destiny.
Grover is revealed as a satyr, half-man, half-goat and all girl-loving horndog. The headmaster is a centaur who had been posing as a wheelchair-bound professor at his school, played by Pierce Brosnan. Luke (Jake Abel) is the friendly son of Hermes who takes Percy into his confidence. Annabeth (Alexandra Daddario), daughter of Athena, is the baddest warrior in camp.
(No hint as to why all the demigod students happen to be between 16 and 18 years of age -- was the early 1990s the Summer of Love for gods coming to Earth to knock boots?)
The plot is fairly simplistic and silly, something involving finding their way into Hell to confront Hades, who's taken Percy's mother hostage. First they have to find three magical pearls that will allow them to return from the fiery depths.
This, of course, involves fighting increasingly dangerous critters pulled from the pages of Greek and Roman lore. Uma Thurman has a nice cameo as a sunglasses-wearing medusa. Other star turns include Sean Bean as Zeus, Rosario Dawson as the spouse of Hades, and Steve Coogan as the original man in black himself.
"Percy Jackson" is certainly not a great film, but it's well-executed family entertainment that will keep even parents reasonably entertained.
The only supernatural mystery is why the studio didn't want critics to see it.
