The Definitive Guide to Living in the Capital , Cairo , Egypt

It would be very unreasonable to expect cinematic greatness from the big-screen adaptation of the 90’s popular television series Baywatch – the show which, despite its cheesiness and feeble storylines, managed to become one of the most-watched television shows in the world – but a little bit of creativity and effort wouldn’t have hurt anyone.

The story introduces us to Lieutenant Mitch Buchannon (Johnson); a self-assured and much-loved leader of the Baywatch lifeguard team at Emerald Bay. Working alongside his second-in-command, Stephanie (Hadera), and fellow veteran, C.J (Rohrbach), Mitch soon brings in three lifeguard trainees into their annual summer training program, including the sexy and capable, Summer Quinn (Daddario), the less equipped but enthusiastic, Ronnie Greenbaum (Bass) and finally disgraced two-time Olympic gold medalist, Matt Brody (Efron).

Mitch is not too keen about accepting Matt onto his team, believing that the young man’s arrogance, which ended up robbing his Olympic relay team a chance of winning some time ago, will bring nothing but trouble. However, Mitch’s boss, Captain Thorp (Huebel) insists, trusting that Matt’s presence will bring his crew much-needed community PR.  Reluctantly giving in, Mitch and his new team soon begin investigating the rise in drug activity on their beach, which soon leads them to the new owner of an expensive beachfront resort, Victoria Leeds (Chopra). Believing that she is somehow connected to the drugs and a number of deaths that have recently occurred on the beach, the team soon begin digging further, only to realize that the situation is much more complicated than they expected.

Scripted by 2009’s Friday the 13th Damian Shannon and Mark Swift and directed by Horrible Bosses’ Seth Gordon, Baywatch, fails to leave a lasting impression with its crassness and stupidity; constantly getting off track, by primarily focusing on bouncing boobs and floppy genitalia. And while the ladies of the show are resorted to the classic babe-in-a-bathing-suit stereotypes with not much to do except look pretty, Johnson and Efron were likable and charming enough to make the story’s two-hour running time somewhat digestible; becoming Baywatch’s a redeeming feature.

Also, Baywatch, to be fair, manages to do well on the action front; delivering a handful of exciting action sequences both under water and on land.  However, the pluses are not strong enough to outweigh the minuses, which in this case, are aplenty.  Superficial, cheesy and most notably, ridiculous; Baywatch rests somewhere between a homage to the hit television show and an R-rated parody. Sadly, though, it doesn’t manage to get either of them right.