FILM: Baywatch (dir: Seth Gordon, 2017)

"It was worth a try."

Of the two particular huge 80s TV properties - Dallas and Baywatch - that have languished in Development Hell for years while studios and writers have tried to nail the right tone to bring them to the big screen, Baywatch finally emerges without that issue having been fully resolved.  The template is clearly the money-spinning 21/22 Jump Street films, but this film is thinner on laughs (largely owing to the ridiculous two-hour runtime) and the script is surprisingly timid.  Take out a couple of deliberate gross-out scenes, and what remains is a bigger-budget, noisy, relatively straight update of the original TV show.  Johnson and Efron are both now very proficient at this kind of straight-faced comedy delivery and are well cast here, but the rest of the characters have little to do.  It is not the disaster that a lot of critics are saying, but the final impression is that if this film had purposefully gone for all-out comedy or a fully-serious take, a better film may have resulted instead of this version which curiously falls between the two.