Baywatch

Imagine you're minding your own business, sitting at a bar somewhere, drinking a decent domestic, noshing on their complimentary bowl of sesame sticks contemplatively, and this dude suddenly comes up to you with a big grin on his face, like the hilarity is about to explode out of him. "I've got a joke for you," he says, sitting on the stool next to you and annoyingly pushing your beer to one side. "But it's totally, totally stupid." You tell him that's OK, that sometimes dumb jokes told properly can still be pretty funny. He leans in, you can smell his breath, which is as if his tongue was coated in bubonic plague. "OK," he continues, "I'm telling you, it's super dumb, cuz I'm a super-dumb guy and I love dumb jokes like this."

Now you're a little intrigued. You think to yourself, "What if this joke actually turns out to be really funny in a kind of self-referential, meta way? Like something Andy Kaufman would have done." You perk up, because it's been a while since you laughed at anything, and now this wild-eyed dude, who can't wipe the smile off his face, has promised you a dumb joke that you now anticipate to be funny. He takes a deep breath.

See, the thing about effectively funny jokes is they are setting us up to laugh one way or another. Something truly funny succeeds in large part because of our anticipation of the hook to come. A comic standing on stage who tells a long joke with a delayed climax gets bonus laughs if the point of the joke actually does surprise you. Like a magician focusing your attention on something else in order to pull off a complex illusion, a good comedian creates a misdirection in order to surprise you with the punch line.

Sadly, the converse can also be true, when a joke promises to be stupid and actually just is, it falls flatter than a sheet of paper under a Zamboni. That becomes the opposite of funny, which isn't tragedy but tedium.

These are the sorts of musings one resorts to when faced with a film like Baywatch: embracing its stupidity by giving the audience almost exactly what they would have anticipated. We know, for example, that at some point head lifeguard Mitch (Dwayne Johnson) and his snot-nosed guard-in-training Brody (Zac Efron) will somehow end up in drag; they will have to lock lips (probably as part of CPR); and, naturally, they will eventually bond over their differences. The fact that these things all come to pass -- amid a good deal more things of equally predictable stupidity -- suggests the screenwriters were content to take the most shamelessly lazy path to filling out their 120 pages of drivel.

Part of the problem is the film can't quite decide the nature of where the jokes are meant to be coming from. Is it making wink-wink fun of the original (brutally bad) TV show, with its endless slo-mos of rippling torsos and jiggling busts tearing up and down the beach, and the fact that a group of lifeguards should have absolutely no jurisdiction over crime scenes? Is it trying to give us character-based humor with the endlessly affable and noble Mitch, socking it to the immature Brody every chance he gets? Is it a bunch of really bad sex jokes and humiliations, generally circulating around poor Ronnie Greenbaum (Jon Bass), the lone portly lifeguard, who serves as the focal point of embarrassment (and naturally pulls off a long dance scene in a club) only to win the heart of his obsessional love, CJ Parker (Kelly Rohrbach), as a reward? Is the movie, as was the show, seriously ridiculous, or ridiculously serious? Are we actually meant to feel the danger posed by the evil Victoria Leeds (Priyanka Chopra), a would be real-estate barron who is circulating drugs from her club in order to lower area real-estate prices (because, yeah, that's how that works) whereupon she can snatch up all the available land and build a huge series of developments?

Nobody seems to know, least of all the film's director, Seth Gordon, so we're treated to a series of scenes, some slapstick, some serious, some prurient, and some extolling the noble nature of teamwork, that have virtually no cohesion. It feels like a mishmash of half-baked one-liners with very little to connect them. Lacking a unified core -- like a confused, theme-challenged restaurant that serves cupcakes, fried chicken and hummus -- the film resorts to idiotic spectacle. We have Efron taking off his shirt to reveal an almost comically ripped upper body -- to crib a line from National Lampoon back in the day, he's just a bunch of skin wrapped around a six-pack -- Johnson running around and whupping on gangsters; poor Ronnie getting his manhood stuck between the slats of a reclining deck chair (please don't ask); characterless women running around in skin-tight swimsuits revealing lots of cleavage; and various insipid scenes of the gang going "undercover" and infiltrating this dangerous drug ring.

The unexpected success of 21 Jump Street, which sagely did away with much of the show's original concept in favor of irreverent self-mocking, gave studios exactly the wrong message. Not every lousy TV show from the last 40 years can work as a hip, self-referential film (remember The A-Team? Charlie's Angels? The Dukes of Hazzard?). In fact, very few of them actually amount to more than a passing note of unearned nostalgia from millennials, and a means by which they can torment and mock their parents. Even the trick of casting call-backs from the former TV show's biggest stars (David Hasselhoff -- making his second summer appearance as a pop-culture throwback, and we're not even out of May yet; and Pamela Anderson) does little to justify the rest of hellaciousness to which we've already been subjected.

Back at the bar, just as the man is about to launch into his joke, you suddenly think better of it and look past him out the window into the night sky. You pat him on the shoulder, stand up with your beer, and head outside, where the cool ocean breeze blows his memory straight out of your mind. If the world actually worked this way, I suspect we'd all be better off.

MovieStyle on 05/26/2017