Baywatch. Don't.

I couldn't be arsed inserting a pic from the film so
I drew a puddle of dehydrated piss. It's better than the film.

You know when you hear a film is awful and you hear the same from everyone and you think to yourself "ah it can't be that bad" and then it turns out to be worse that you could possibly have imagined. Well that's Baywatch, a manky puddle of dehydrated orange tinted piss that you should avoid like the plague in case it splashes on you and its odour infects you.

It's that bad.

Dwayne Johnson plays Mitch, the hero lifeguard, the king of the beach. He's tasked with training 3 new lifeguards while at the same time is suspicious of the origin of a package of drugs that washed up on the beach near an exclusive club. The 3 newbies are the gorgeous girl (Alexandria Daddario), the loser nerd guy and the troubled guy. Troubled guy is played by Zac Efron. They all work together to investigate the source of the drugs while Efron struggles to find his place on the team. And that's the story more or less.

It's a horrible film. The plot you could write on a matchbox. Lazy implausible storytelling relying on profanity and cock jokes for laughs. The lifeguards doing the job of cops and spies to pad out the story. The fact the large lumps of the film seem to be missing even though the film is already insanely overlong at nearly 2 hours. Subplots are started and abandoned as fast. Alexandria Daddario, Priyanka Chopra and the other women in the film are just there to provide cleavage, they get nothing of note to do or say and it's painful to watch. The film is all about the 2 blokes and they seem to be on auto-pilot, Johnson especially.  A running joke of Johnson insulting Efron by calling him boyband names made me want to break up my chair and throw it at the screen the 2nd time he did it. The 50th time he did it i just whimpered. They flat out play unlikeable characters, Johnson is smug and Efron is an asshole. Plus it contains some awful CGI. Scenes of people in the water don't even look real. IN A FILM SET ON A BEACH! Just reeks of shoddiness. Shoddy, shoddy, shoddy.

I like Dwayne Johnson. He's funny and charming and looks like he could destroy the world with one arm tied behind his back. But lately he's trying to be a jack of all trades. Action hero one minute, tv star another, then comedian and back to action and so on. His films make money, so he gets to do what he wants but he's spread too thin and his quality control is dropping. Its the only explanation I can think of for this film.

Comedies are meant to be funny. You are supposed to laugh. You aren't supposed to sit stony faced through them. You aren't supposed to cringe. You really shouldn't be looking at your phone every 5 minutes wishing it was all over. The only reason I didn't leave is because I left a film last week and I'm still pissed off about that.

I don't know how they banjaxed it all up so badly. Baywatch was great fun. We all watched it, even you, ya you. It was easy Saturday evening tv, candy floss for the eyes. The makers of the 21 Jump Street films managed to take the show they were remaking, apply it to an R-rated template and come out grand so why couldn't this. Those films had a bit of charm though, likeable leads, characters you wanted to see succeed. I like Johnson and Efron, just not in this. They play dickheads, dickheads you can't bring yourself to care a jot about and that's a fatal error in a comedy. There's nothing wrong with a bit of heart in a film.

And the cameo's. Sweet jesus, the laziest kind of fan service. 2 actors from the original show are wheeled out in the most pointless way possible just so some dope in the crowd will giggle.

Spoiler. The David Hasselhoff cameo stopped being funny in 2004 after the one in Dodgeball. Please stop wheeling him out. Plus its the 2nd time he's done it in 2 months and it sucked that time too. 

Don't go see this. It's fucking awful. I went cos I'm a fool. Save yerselves.