In the only funny scene in the ridiculously unwatchable Baywatch, Priyanka Chopra, in a gravity defying gown, glowers at a hapless extra pinned to a chair. “I am not a Bond villain,” she purrs. “At least not yet!” she says.
You got that right, Ms Chopra. You got that pat down.
Honestly, no one expected Baywatch to be a film of any kind of substance, but this?!
This overflowing sewer of a mess deserves special attention. Who wrote this thing? How did it sneak out of the recycle bin of the script writer’s computer? If you ask me, it has been written by alien life forms who read the comments section of all beef ban articles for a week and drew the following conclusions about human behaviour.
-All men are stupid
– Some men are stupid people with big penises
– All women are stupid people with great bodies
– When Priyanka Chopra speaks a thousand kittens purr in ecstacy
Or maybe it was written by Donald Trump during one of his late-night Twitter rampages.
‘Despite the constant negative press covfefe, Priyanka Chopra shows great perfefe.’
And before you go all why-are-you-pulling-down-our-desi-girl on me, I would like you to point out that Chopra has a screen time of roughly 10 minutes in this two-hour long torture fest. Ten minutes of Ms Chopra surveying the mess around her. The longest ten minutes of her career (which included turkeys like Love Story 2050).
Few hours into the set, she probably wanted a way out as soon as she saw Dwayne Johnson mouth his first dialogue.
If you have seen the cheesy original series of the 1990s that starred Pamela Anderson and her silicon-enhanced breasts, you probably know that this film is about out-of-line lifeguards with a laughable sense of entitlement. Led by Dwayne I-am-so-succesful-I-don’t-have-to-try-anymore Johnson, they go about messing with police business. They have a new recruit, Zac Efron, a disgraced swimming champion with the IQ of a macaroni samosa.
Get this. He is so dumb that he makes Dwayne Jhonson look smart.
Because he is so pretty (really?), the homophobic members of the crew keep referring to him with different boy band names- One Direction, Jonas Brothers, etc.
There are other fringe characters in the crew who are either always running in slow motion or getting their member stuck in every conceivable nook.
There is friction between Dwayne and Zac which means this is is veering towards the dangerous territory of buddy bromances. Except that it doesn’t have the chutzpah to even pull that off. Actually, Baywatch is a David Dhawan’s Bade Miyan Chotte Miya without Govinda and Amitabh Bachchan.
By the time Priyanka Chopra gets to speak her first line in the film, Baywatch has already been established as an unmitigated disaster. She is the owner of a nightclub place and wants to take over the whole city. She is indeed fashioned like a Bond villain, but this is Bond villain lite, very lite. Her two henchmen are buffed to gay porn specifications. But their only job is to be at the other end of Chopra’s snarls.
Really Priyanka, after 7 Khoon Maaf and Bajirao Mastani, this?
But here is the most sobering thought, Baywatch, in all its unwatchableness, has proved one thing without a speck of a doubt. No matter how good we are, we are only good enough if we have Hollywood’s stamp of approval.