baywatch

Memorial Day is the official start of summer, but in Movieland, summer starts well before, in early May or even sooner. (I generally say there four season on the calendar but only two seasons for movies: Summer and Awards.) Still, Memorial Day is still supposed to be a big deal in movie theaters; kids have an extra day off from school and Hollywood delivers some of the season’s biggest offerings.

There was no jocularity on Baywatch when I was a child. These brave men and women in red bathing suits were doing very important things, like guarding lives, performing CPR, running in slow-motion, and occasionally starting totally random spinoff shows featuring sea monsters. The new Baywatch movie is a new breed of ‘watch. These guys do joke around, constantly. It’s Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron as mismatched partners on the lifeguard scene, joking about one another’s testicles, performing highly unprofessional autopsies, and even arguing over severed limbs. Seriously: Not your Hasselhoff’s Baywatch.

It’s weird — with every new trailer, the upcoming big-screen reboot of beloved ‘90s TV series Baywatch appears to get a little bit better. The first trailer promised a lightly amusing clone of the smart-alecky 21 Jump Street reboot, the second trailer advertised a competently-produced action tentpole with a healthy sprinkling of meta humor, and now, the so-called “official” trailer (does that make the first two unofficial?) teases what appears to be a sincerely funny comedy. At the very least, whoever cut this thing made it abundantly clear that stars Zac Efron and Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson have more chemistry than an eighth-grade science class.

If you are going to make a Baywatch movie — even one that’s a tongue-in-cheek satire of the original — there’s a few things you’ve got to have. You need men and women in red bathing suits. You need people running on the beach in slow motion. You need that magnificent theme song. You need at least one reference to Baywatch Nights. And you need David Hasslehoff and Pamela Anderson.