I didn’t enjoy Baywatch very much, but I may not be the target audience. I have never watched the original series, and I’m not a fan of low brow comedy, so take this review with a grain of salt. I’m definitely not who this film was intended for. Baywatch reminds me of a quote that has stuck with me: “You can’t make fun of a clown. If you point at its shoes and make fun of it for having big feet, you’re the idiot.” The story is bad, the characters are flat, and everything feels superficial, but… that feels like it’s the point.

Baywatch is true to the original. It’s a convoluted cop flick based around lifeguards, which, as is pointed out frequently, are not cops. It jokes about the original even as it pays homage, with guest appearances from both David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson. I went in expecting to enjoy a pretty fun if shallow comedy, and it comes pretty close to that.

Even if it’s being true to the original though, its story isn’t silly enough. It’s at that spot between good, bad, and good bad. It was just bad enough to irritate me, but not bad enough to be funny bad. I think the problem may be that the premise of life guards fighting crime isn’t bad enough on its own. That’s probably why the original show did so well, they’re close enough to heroes that it makes a weird kind of sense for them to fight crime. It needs to be either a little more serious or a little less. It lands right in this dead zone for me where I’m bored and irritated.

That said, I did laugh a few times, and there are some good jokes sprinkled around. A lot can be forgiven of a movie that’s able to make me laugh, but about half the time it goes too far. Some of the gags are so disgusting they were painful to look at and I really wish I hadn’t seen them. Maybe if they’d been a little more tame I could have at least recommended this as a thin if mildly enjoyable comedy.

Unfortunately, as it turned out, the good parts of Baywatch don’t outweigh the bad. No part of it is fantastic, and the story and gross humor undo all of the positive elements for me. Maybe don’t change the channel if an edited version of it is on TV, but I didn’t like it and don’t recommend watching it.