‘Baywatch’ Gets Drowned by Critics: ‘Not Even Dwayne Johnson Can Save It’

Seth Gordon’s R-Rated comedy, which is based on the hit ’90s TV series of the same name and stars The Rock as David Hasselhoff’s Mitch Buchannon, has an 11 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes after early reviews came in on Tuesday.

TheWrap’s Alonso Duralde also noted that the film’s raunchy jokes clashed with its attempts to establish a coming-of-age arc for Zac Efron’s character, Matt Brody, a disgraced Olympic swimmer who joins Buchannon’s lifeguard team when his career options run dry.

Director Seth Gordon – who created some laughs in ‘Horrible Bosses,’ far fewer in ‘Identity Thief’ – doesn’t seem to know how to build a joke, and is afraid of taking on cliches.

Back in 1995, ‘The Brady Bunch Movie’ showed that there was a clever, postmodern way to turn our mothballed childhood memories into irreverent satire.

Much of the editing feels shoddily cut together and the CGI veers from noticeably cheap (characters on a boat with clear green screen behind them) to laughably bad (a boat on fire and the cast tearing through it to save lives is hysterically awful).

[...] most of the movie’s well-considered camera blocking centers around finding ways to perfectly frame Kelly Rohrbach’s enormous cleavage and the gratuitous slow-motion shots highlighting breasts that seem to defy gravity.

In previous comedies, such as the ‘Neighbors’ movies, we’ve seen Efron play his beautifully sculpted type with slightly more nuance, whereas here he acts exactly like you’d expect an irredeemable buff bro stereotype would: he’s egotistical, brash, and ends up just being annoying.