‘Baywatch’ Review: Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron Sink in the Shallows

A summer franchise movie that can’t decide if it wants to be a hard-R bawdy comedy, a d-bag-comes-of-age tale or a fairly unironic reboot of the glossy TV show (which ran from 1989-2001), “Baywatch” fails at all three, despite the best efforts of the perennially game Johnson and Zac Efron, two performers who have subverted audiences’ assumptions about their limitations and have emerged as solid comic actors.

Efron plays Olympic swimmer Matt Brody — and if any movie shouldn’t be allowed to whip out a “Jaws” reference, it’s this one — a two-time gold medalist who’s become a national joke (think Ryan Lochte); he excelled on his own but got drunk the night before the relay and barfed in the pool.

[...] Brody won’t be assigned his whistle until he meets the approval of Baywatch chief Mitch Buchannon (Johnson); the two have the standard brash-rookie-loner vs. seasoned-team-player conflicts, but Brody does make the team, alongside the very competent Summer (Alexandra Daddario, who played Johnson’s daughter in “San Andreas”) and the nerdy Ronnie (Jon Bass), who has a seemingly hopeless crush on blonde lifeguard CJ (Kelly Rohrbach).

Director Seth Gordon once made a charming documentary (“The King of Kong,” referenced here via Ronny’s Donkey Kong T-shirt) before Hollywood plugged him into a string of lifeless and mostly laugh-less comedies: “Four Christmases,” “Horrible Bosses,” “Identity Thief,” and now “Baywatch.”

Six people collaborated on a screenplay that offers less than one laugh per writer, and the tone shifts are jarring; one minute Buchannon is forcing Brody to check a corpse’s very intimate areas for evidence of heroin injection — a slapstick set-up from which Gordon mines no comedy — and then the next we’re supposed to care about Brody growing up or about the drug subplot.

If nothing else, “Baywatch,” the TV series, exported the bright California sunshine to a world market; “Baywatch,” the movie, on the other hand, often looks sickly, whether from an excess of obvious green-screen or the hazy cinematography by Eric Steelberg (“Men, Women & Children”); Florida beaches haven’t looked this overcast since “From Justin to Kelly.”