TheRetroCritic

Loosely based on the popular 90's television series, Baywatch is a blockbuster comedy starring Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron as lifeguards who investigate a potential drug lord suspected of conducting their business around the beach. The comedic approach to Baywatch makes sense: everyone knows how silly the show was and everyone made fun of it to a certain extent back when it was on, even if you enjoyed it. Friends celebrated its goofiness back in the 90's and there have been countless spoofs since, including a memorable cameo by David Hasselhoff in  The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie . Unfortunately, dated TV shows rarely translate all that well into big blockbusters: CHiPs (also released last year) got panned, everyone forgot there even was an A-Team movie and the  Starsky & Hutch  movie didn't exactly re-invent cinema, though it was admittedly a fun watch. With a project like this, arguably the best approach is to take a page from Airplane! 's book and play

The Farrelly Brothers and Ben Stiller reunited in 2007 for The Heartbreak Kid , a loose remake of the screwball 70's comedy starring Charles Grodin and Cybill Shepherd in which a man finally gets married only to find that his new wife is not quite the dream woman he initially thought she was. Eddie (Stiller) is a single guy who runs a sports shop in San Francisco, one day he meets Lila (Malin Akerman) and they start dating. Soon enough, after Lila tells him that she might have to move to the Netherlands because of work, they get married and are promptly off to Cabo for their honeymoon. On the way there, Lila starts to act strangely and reveals all sorts of off-putting details about herself. Unfortunately for Eddie, this keeps getting worse and worse so when he falls in love with another woman he meets while on vacation, asking Lila for a divorce becomes a priority even if it proves harder to do than he thought. Setting a comedy after the usual "Happily Ever After" ro

Following The Ridiculous Six , Adam Sandler delivers his latest Netflix-produced creation The Do-Over , a buddy comedy in which Sandler gives David Spade's loser the chance to build a whole new life for himself. It's a much smaller film in scale than the aforementioned Western and it's all the better for it as it allows more focus on the characters and the story rather than endless silly jokes and too many side characters. Which is not to say The Do-Over doesn't have silly jokes but it doesn't feel the need to hit you over the head with them too often. The core premise is pretty clever as Max, Sandler's character, reconnects with Charlie (Spade), an old friend from high school, before the former takes it upon himself to fake their deaths in the hope of freeing each other from the burdens of their current lives. It turns out that Charlie isn't too keen on reinventing himself just yet plus it turns out that Max isn't the FBI agent he was claiming to b

Whatever happened to the Farrelly Brothers? Now don't get me wrong, these guys were never the Fellini Brothers but for a while they were the go-to guys for gross-out, dumb but cute comedies. But after the genius of Dumb & Dumber , the creativity of There's Something About Mary and the extreme silliness of Me Myself and Irene things got too dumb ( Shallow Hal ) or too cute ( Perfect Catch ) leaving the brothers in a sort of comedy no man's land... Then Hall Pass comes along. Yes it's set in Providence, yes it's about two buddy idiots...but alas Dumb & Dumber this most certainly isn't. For one thing it's barely funny. Barring a couple of amusing build-ups or observations there's really nothing here to count on laughs-wise. Even the likes of Richard Jenkins, Christina Applegate, Jenna Fischer and Stephen Merchant fail to raise a single smile, it's really quite astonishing. That said, Owen Wilson is great and manages to create a surpri