Baywatch : Alerte à Malibu

Autre souvenir des années quatre-vingt-dix : chaque samedi quand j’étais à l’école primaire, je regardais La Bande à Picsou, suivi de Skippy, puis de Tarzan et, enfin, Alerte à Malibu. Je n'étais pas particulièrement fan de la série, mais il était impossible de ne pas la voir ou du moins d'en entendre parler. Pamela ne vaut pas le coup d’être mentionnée et le pari sur la nostalgie des fans était visiblement un coup dans l’eau. En tout cas, d’après ce que j’ai lu, le film est un flop commercial et les critiques ne manquant pas de se déchaîner. Moi, je ne m’attendais pas à un miracle, mais je suis relativement satisfait. Je dirais même que j’ai passé un bon moment, du moins tant que le ton n’était pas trop sérieux – à partir de là, j’aimais moins. D’après moi, Dwayne est un bon choix pour le personnage de Mitch. Par contre, Kelly est trop mielleuse. Et Alexandra, il m’a fallu cinq minutes de réflexion pour me souvenir où je venais de la voir : dans True Detective. OK :-) (07/09/2017)

C'est tellement mauvais. Dommage. Si au moins une comédie fécale honnête en sortait, à laquelle cette introduction (drôle !) avec un pénis claqué mène. Mais rien ne fonctionne ici, et après deux heures (et l'incapacité croissante des créateurs à le maintenir ensemble dans au moins un plan), le final est littéralement pénible. Même les caméos de Hasselhoff et Pamela ne sont pas incorporés de manière originale ou amusante. Et cela dure quelques secondes seulement ! (18/06/2017)

I can endure a lot. I don't have any particularly nostalgic relationship with the original phenomenon Baywatch, and I always appreciate Priyanka Chopra as a villain. But this film doesn't make sense even in the series of the strange "comedies with Dwayne Johnson" subgenre. There is nothing more here than a bit of humor for tweens and completely botched cameos by David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson. (11/08/2023)

When the muscular men aren’t diving into the water in slow motion and the beautiful women aren’t emerging from the water in slow motion (the film never rises above the level of how male and female bodies are depicted in subverting gender stereotypes), two or more characters stand/sit on the beach and, in unimaginatively shot scenes, spend a tiresomely long time dragging out an adolescent joke about, for example, the age of Efron’s character (“Where did you come from, One Direction?”) or a sidekick’s inability to form an articulate thought when coming face to face with a person of the opposite sex. As a star vehicle for Dwayne Johnson, this two-hour celebration of virility and heroism based more on physical strength than on intellect works particularly well when it exaggerates the protagonist’s perfection to the edge of deliberate parody. Unfortunately, it does so by repeatedly using the same template, with a laziness that is characteristic of how the whole film is written (piling up supposedly humorous asides instead of developing the joke) and directed (poor timing of the bumbling action scenes). In the second half, which is mostly focused on a rather insipid crime plot (serving mainly as an excuse for The Rock to punch someone in the mouth), the film is not only short on humour (rather, it is unironically affected), but it also runs out of ideas, loses pace and doesn’t have a proper build-up. Among other things, this is due to the fact that the main star disappears from the film for quite a long time, thus taking away the only reason to suffer through this comedy targeted mainly at boys under the age 15 (and apparently written by people of the same age and gender). 40% (15/06/2017)

When I was a kid, I watched the Baywatch quite a lot. That’s also the reason why I was so curious about the Rock’s and Zac Efron’s performances in the remake. In the end, I must say I’m quite disappointed. The comedy isn’t innovative, it’s not explicit, it’s really not anything in particular. It has its moments, but overall, it’s more stupid than it is funny. Pamela Anderson and David Hasselhoff even make an appearance, but they are so utterly uninteresting that they basically copy the movie’s overall vibe. It was bad. And that’s quite a shame. (27/08/2017)