Here’s what you need to know:
- They’re making a Baywatch movie.
- It stars Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson and Zac Efron.
- It’s a comedy. (Yes, really!)
On the surface, a Baywatch movie seems like pretty lazy nostalgia-bait, but based on the trailer, this ain’t your ’90s Baywatch. The leads may be wearing swimsuits, but with all this talk of dead bodies washing up on the beach and bullets flying, this looks an awful lot like a buddy-cop movie, and not just any buddy-cop movie, but a 21 Jump Street–style reimagining that finds the humor in the qualities of Baywatch, like danger, romance, and (of course) running in slow motion.
It will certainly be fun to watch Johnson and Efron solve beach crimes and crack jokes about their testicles while wearing next to nothing. And between his performances in Neighbors 1 and 2 and Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, Efron has proven a gift for frat-bro comedy, making him perfectly cast as a dim-witted former Olympian. (Remind you of anyone?) But it would also be nice if some of the movie’s female characters got to do more than just act as jiggling eye candy, considering that the film also stars Alexandra Daddario, Priyanka Chopra, and Kelly Rohrbach.
The stars of the original TV show, David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson, are expected to make appearances in the film, in theaters May 26.
