Friday, July 21, 2017

Baywatch - The Movie Version of the Popular 1990s TV series

After few months already playing in most other countries, finally this movie premiered in Indonesia 2 days ago. I was not sure that this movie was going to play here due to the nature of the movie and because even though the poster was shown in some of the cinema websites, but they seemed to have gone in the past month or so. Until 2 or 3 weeks ago suddenly it popped again. The movie was something that I looked forward to since it was one of my (and my wife's) favorite TV shows many years ago. Especially when the movie was having few famous stars playing in it. Anyway let us move along to the movie.

Brief Story Line

Mitch Buchannon (Dwayne Johnson - MoanaThe Fate of the Furious etc) was a lieutenant of an elite team of lifeguards in Emerald Bay, Florida called Baywatch. He was well known to the people of the area since he had saved a lot of people there and even solved some cases around the beach. During one of his usual morning run, he found a small bag of drugs that was pushed ashore and realized that someone was distributing this in the area.


With the team running low on lifeguards, Baywatch opened 3 spots to their team. Mitch and his second in command Stephanie Holden (Ilfenesh Hadera) and also one of the senior lifeguards named C.J Parker (Kelly Rohrbach) led the tryouts. In short, 3 new member of the team were accepted as trainees. First was Ronnie (Jon Bass) who was a smart tech kind of person and managed to get in after his third tryout. Second was Summer Quinn (Alexandra Daddario - San Andreas, Percy Jackson series etc). And last but not least Matt Brody (Zac Efron - High School Musical, Hairspray, The Neighbors etc) who was a winner of 2 gold medals in the Olympics and only came to work as lifeguard due to some reasons involving his previous bad behavior.

Meanwhile a new businesswoman named Victoria Leeds (Priyanka Chopra - Quantico TV series) opened the Huntley Club which was a high class club. She was also trying to acquire some properties near the area of her club. It would be revealed later the purpose and her real intention.

As a senior lifeguard who was protecting the beach, Mitch started to find out the drug distribution based on his earlier finding. Things became complicated when his boss, captain Thorpe (Rob Huebel) disagree to the use of his time and also the complaints from the police in charge of the area named Garner (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) who was always at each other's throat with Mitch. Even Matt was not convinced Baywatch should be involved in this matter which caused the rift with Mitch and the rest of the team, especially when there is fatality related to the investigation.

So could the case be solved? Could the 3 trainees be accepted? And would Matt become a real part of the team and let go his selfishness? Find them all in this comedy adventure movie.

End of Brief Story Line

Hmmm, this movie was getting a lot of bad reviews. After seeing it till the end, I can actually understand why most people would say this was a very bad movie. But because of that low expectation, I did not see this movie as a movie that I should take very seriously. I just came to the cinema and enjoy it as it is, which was a comedy adventure movie. When you have watched the TV series as long as I did, I already knew what the storyline would be. There would be plenty of people saving in the water, some investigation, some bad person and so on (you get the idea). Of course the investigation would not be the smartest type like in any good thriller or detective movie. This was just for entertainment purpose only and not to be over-analyzed.

As a comedy adventure movie, this one got some funny moments which usually involve the small dispute between Matt and Mitch (it was amusing to see Mitch calling Matt with various different names of pop stars), or the crush that Ronnie was having to C.J and some other crazy moments (with my favorite one the morgue scene). Though some people may not be able to enjoy those type of jokes as they were a bit raunchy/vulgar. 

The main attraction to this movie would certainly be the good looks of some of the main characters running around on the beach, plus of course Dwayne Johnson who had been in a lot of major successful Hollywood movies in the past few years. Though this one certainly did not fall into that category as it "only" made around USD 169 million even if it was against a USD 69 million budget (which I think it should give small profit to the studio). Which is why some of the special effects looked not as good as those big budget movies. 

I have mentioned above that this was based on the famous and popular TV series back in the 90s and if you were one of those people who have watched that, you would be happy to see that there were appearances from David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson. I also like the way the writers put the name of the characters same as in the series, such as Mitch, C.J Parker (played by Hasselhoff and Anderson respectively), even captain Thorpe and Garner. Although Stephanie (originally played by Alexandra Paul) did not seem to get too much screen time despite being second in command. In addition there were few oldies songs which were quite fun to listen to and were put nicely in few moments. And there were some gag reels during the end credit, but there was no post end credit scene.

Now again, the movie should not be considered as a sophisticated adventure movie with smart dialogues. It is definitely a movie for adults and it even had an R rating in the US. For those who are interested in seeing a fun light adventure comedy movie with scenes mostly shot at the beach and want to have that nostalgic feeling of seeing the original series, then you can definitely give this one a try and see it for yourself. At least my wife and I pretty enjoyed it like some of the audience (two in particular always laughed so hard even though it was not supposed to be funny moments). But for those who would like to see a more serious movie and do not like a movie which was having too much of those raunchy jokes, then I would not recommend you to watch this. The choice is yours.

Happy watching!

Mike's movie moments rating: 3 out of 5 stars

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