[Review] Baywatch (3.5/10)

The new Baywatch movie starts off well, but then quickly and surely went downhill straight away.

The biggest problem here was the writing. If you check out its IMDb page, it has six names attached to the script. Four provided the story but I suspect it's the two that wrote the screenplay that were the weakest link. Judging by their limited body of work as well, I would have to say it must be them.

Zac Efron played the outsider joining into the Baywatch crew led by Dwayne Johnson. And Efron was kind of the link for the audience into this world of Baywatch. However, as the story progressed, it felt like Baywatch was a cult (and I use this word not in its more common negative sense but just as a community of believers in a certain way of doing things); and we the audience had to discover what their beliefs were.

At first, it seemed like it was Efron's character that was in the wrong. But by the start of the second act, we realised that it was the Johnson's character as well as his Baywatch crew that were nonsensical in their words, their thinking and their action. And all these were definitely from the screenplay because the story itself wasn't all that bad.

And I would go as far to say that there was nothing wrong with the cast and their performances, even to the lesser-knowns like Kelly Rohrbach and Ilfenesh Hadera who looked like they worked well under the direction of Seth Gordon.

Johnson was just the usual Johnson. Efron was the one that gave a lot but unfortunately 90% of it didn't work. And it was just bad luck for Alexandra Daddario to be roped into this rubbish by Johnson because he liked working with her from San Andreas. Both her and Efron deserved better than this.

Even Priyanka Chopra made for a competent villain and her character made sense the most.

I mentioned above about how there was actually a story in here, and there was even a character arc for Efron that would have been more rewarding had the script was actually good. But unfortunately, with potential to turn this into a franchise, that has now gone into the dumps because no one in the entire production team saw how horrible the end-product would turn out.

As for the cameo from David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson, they were both horrible.