Zac Efron. Dwayne Johnson. Muscles. Beach. Zac Efron’s and Dwayne Johnson’s muscles at a beach.
Now that we objectified male actors for a change, let’s dive deep into Baywatch, a Seth Gordon film that’s set to be released on May 28 of this year. Judging just from Gordon’s previous work on Horrible Bosses and Identity Thief, it looks funny, and it looks good.
Move over David Hasselhoff! Dwayne Johnson takes over his role as Mitch Buchanan, the super hunky main lifeguard who now has to deal with a new recruit, Matt Brody, and his sporadic ways. Originally played by David Charvet in the television series, this new lifeguard is, surprise, played by Zac Efron. Together, the two must learn to overcome their differences after they find some underground crime ring that could potentially destroy the Bay.
Mark Swift and Damian Shannon (both wrote Friday the 13th) wrote the screenplay based off of the comedic storytelling methods of Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant, and David Ronn and Jay Scherick, the former half who wrote Night at the Museum 3 and Mr. Peabody & Sherman, and the latter half who wrote Zookeeper and both The Smurfs movies. With this amazing comedy team behind the writing alone, we can’t help but look forward to seeing how Johnson and Efron take their characters from the cliche ’90s series to the new modern age of action comedy.
Also starring in the film are Kelly Rohrbach (The PET Squad Files) as C.J. Parker (originally Pamela Anderon), Alexandra Daddario (San Andreas, along with Johnson) as Summer Quinn (originally Nicole Eggert), Ilfenesh Hadera (Billions) as Stephanie Holden (originally Alexandra Paul), and Quantico star Priyanka Chopra as a new character Victoria Leeds.
The trailer might be deceiving however. Of course it opens with some excellently framed shots of the main stars, but it almost looks as if it were directed by Michael Bay. Explosions, helicopters, fireworks. Fighting, ATVs, more explosions. But the short, punchy lines delivered by the characters and the great sight-gags in the trailer redeems all Transformer qualities that might be invoked.
So how close are we getting to the original series? The plots seem rather similar: a veteran lifeguard has to team up with a rookie lifeguard as the two fight crime and befriend other lifeguards at the same time. However, we can most definitely expect some references from the series, considering how Hasselfhoff and Anderson are listed on the cast list as well– as are Hannibal Buress and Oscar Nunez, so we can only wonder how far these comedic hijinks can go. Check out the trailer below and be sure to check out the movie on May 28th.
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