Baywatch

The biggest disappointment of this feature is that it's not even so bad it's good.

The'Baywatch reboot is mildly diverting but altogether dull. Summer fun shouldn't feel like such a chore.

Suffice it to say, too, that there's a lot of delight to be had in the frothy union of the Bay and the Watch, much of it coming from Johnson, who carries the whole of this movie on his epically chiseled lats.

Here is a film so poor, so half-arsed, and so contemptuous of its audience, that it screws up one of the great, (previously) infallible tropes of contemporary cinema: the David Hasslehoff cameo.

It's a long haul and despite his rescue efforts, the one-joke script fails to make it.

Baywatch is a rare movie in one sense: it starts with a good plan, to spoof the 1980s and 90s television series on which it is based, and sticks to it.

Baywatch exchanges many of the soap opera-level character notes and story tangents of the TV show for gushingly over-the-top R-rated gags and blockbuster-level thrills.

In Baywatch, characters are introduced with style. But the storyline itself is routine, predictable.

A movie based on a show about brain-baked lifeguards isn't going to stir memories of, say, A Man for All Seasons or The King's Speech or even Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, but within its own parameters, Baywatch knows the territory.

The tone jockeys back and forth between self-aware and self-serious, refusing to land anywhere in the vicinity of a silly summer comedy.