Few laughs wash ashore in 'Baywatch'

Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron are lifeguards in a movie that never convinces that it has any reason to exist.

Why anyone wanted to turn a beach-boob-and-muscle TV series into a movie is beyond me. But that didn't stop director Seth Gordon (Horrible Bosses and Identity Thief) from taking on the challenge of creating a big-screen version of Baywatch.

In its new version, the always buffed Dwayne Johnson teams with an equally buffed Zac Efron to create a movie that tries to parody something that already looked like parody, a lame bit of 1990s TV that developed a following among those who liked pecs, peek-a-boo bathing suits and unblemished skin.

Mixing hard bodies with a soft-headed mystery involving drugs and real estate, Baywatch is neither funny nor tense enough to drive the movie to whatever destination it may have been trying to reach.

Despite a few attempts at self-referential hipness (cameos from David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson among them), the movie's humor mostly dips as low as the bikinis the Baywatch women wear.

Johnson's Mitch runs the Baywatch lifeguard squad like a military unit; he insists that the lifeguards devote themselves to protecting a stretch of Florida beach as if it were Fort Knox.

As part of a PR ploy, Mitch is forced to hire a disgraced Olympic medalist (Efron) who begins the movie as a kind of selfish outlier but (here's a surprise) eventually accepts the group ethos.

To further fulfill the demands of contemporary comedy, the movie adds the obligatory nerdy guy to its muscular mix. Jon Bass plays Ronnie, a guy who's accepted as a lifeguard trainee because he has "heart." The movie's first big joke involves Ronnie, an erection and a beach chair with slats. It's not the last penis joke, either.

Despite his bean-bag physique, Ronnie seems to catch the eye of a bombshell, run-in-slow-mo lifeguard played by Kelly Rohrbach.

Priyanka Chopra who plays Victoria, the villain of the piece, a woman with murderous plans to acquire every bit of real estate in the bay area.

A local cop (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) wonders why a group of lifeguards are getting themselves involved in crime. You may share his consternation, but then it's probably not fair to expect a Baywatch movie to make much sense.

About three-quarters of the way through, the script finds a way to sideline Johnson and allow Efron to dominate the proceedings, a major mistake.

Forget the movie's amped-up ocean rescues: Someone was needed to rescue a screenplay that should have been beached.

If you're looking for a movie that has some laughs and effectively deals with the idiocy of bygone TV shows, try Mindhorn, a British comedy available on Netflix. It actually manages to find some laughs in telling the story of a washed-up TV hero who's asked to help solve a real-life murder

'Identity Thief' can't steal a laugh

Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy in a formulaic road comedy that mines a garbage heap of gags..

Just when I thought things couldn't possibly get worse or less funny, the abysmally contrived Identity Thief introduced a car chase, a move for which the phrase "insult to injury" surely was invented.

Identity Thief wastes both Melissa McCarthy and Jason Bateman in a road-trip comedy that produces more grimaces than laughs.

Maybe McCarthy (Bridesmaids and This is 40) is best in small doses. Here, she comes close to wearing out her welcome as Diana, a Florida-based thief who steals other people's identities and uses their credit card info to finance wanton spending sprees.

A woeful script has Diana stealing the identity of Sandy Paterson (Bateman), a Denver-based husband and father. Threatened with bankruptcy and the loss of a new job, Sandy decides to travel to Florida to corral his nemesis, bring her back to Colorado and save what's left of his crumbling life and shattered reputation.

The cross-country trip is supposed to be excruciating for Bateman's Sandy, but it's equally painful for us as director Seth Gordon wades through a large pile of gag garbage, which includes car carnage and Diana's encounter with a horny widower named Big Chuck (Eric Stonestreet). Meanwhile, Diana is being pursued by a sleazy skip tracer (Robert Patrick) and two assassins (Genesis Rodriguez and T.I.) who operate on orders from a guy in prison.

Don't ask whether any of this tracks. Like just about everything else in this brashly distasteful comedy, very little makes sense.

You can tell the movie will flounder right from the start. Sandy, who's supposed to be a financial guy, improbably and foolishly falls for an obvious ruse. He gives his name and Social Security number to Diana, who poses as an official who calls to tell him that someone's trying to mess with his credit.

How likely is it that a guy who manages the finances of an investment company wouldn't do a bit of investigating before turning over his Social Security number?

Of course, credibility wouldn't matter if Identity Thief produced sufficient laughs as Diana and Sandy work their way toward Denver.

McCarthy can be very funny, and she certainly knows how to steal a scene, but her one-note truculence gets old when spread over 111 minutes. Poor Bateman. He winds up in the thankless job of straight man, as well as the butt of dumb jokes about his character's masculinity.

Not unexpectedly, this mess of a road trip takes a few sentimental turns that are supposed to make us like Diana, despite the fact that she's a pathological liar and felon.

Vulgar jokes, crashed cars and sentiment? McCarthy and Bateman, two actors who know how to be funny, deserved better.