The late Needham, the auto-chase auteur behind the "Smokey And The Bandit" and "Cannonball Run" movies, brought back a bizarre genre that hadn't been attempted since the Frank Sinatra & His Rat Pack films,,,,,,,,,the throwaway movie, the slapdash junker put together for the sole amusement of the actors starring in it. (Not surprising that Sinatra and some surviving rat-packers show up in the Cannonball Runs....)
You could tell nobody showed up to work hard on throwaway movies.......they were all there to horse around and have a good time......and maybe transfer some of the infectious fun they were having to anyone sitting down to watch them. (Only in a Needham movie could you encounter Roger Moore playing a guy named Seymour Goldfarb who, in delusion, thinks he's James Bond....)
Hey, sometimes it worked. Needham probably only yelled "Cut!" if the actors bumped into the furniture......other than that, he mostly sat back and let them try to crack each other up with their own barrage of goofy ad-libs.
Stunts aplenty, but nothing costing mega-millions......and mercifully, long before the plague of CGI.
We lovingly bring up Hal and his disposable movies as a comparison to what the corporate studios have done today with their own versions of throwaway junk movies.......
The modern day throwaways now cost unimaginable millions, require multiple special effects companies and hundreds upon hundreds of digital artists laboring at computer terminals....
Fun? Forget it. In pouring so much money and resources into concocting these cinematic landfills, all the fun gets drained out of them. Unlike Hal Needham's breezy, lazy farces, you can sense all the sweat and strain that goes into today's equivalent junkheaps......they're exhausting to watch, and exhausted in spirit themselves.
Now here's the sad part about the roundly villified and despised "Baywatch".........deep, deep inside the Mt. Everest of manure that comprises this film, there's a funny little Hal Needham movie struggling to get out from under the piles of Summer Tentpole dung. You can spot it in the honestly funny byplay between that oddest pairing of Alpha Males, Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron.
Yes, the movie's a blazing atrocity, but we laughed out loud at those brief, funny back-and-forths between the King and Prince of rippled abs. If the studio and filmmakers had been smart enough to jettison all the required Summer Tentpole garbage (endless CGI action sequences, ludicrous attempts to provide a dramatic arc for Zefron's character, a fetishistic abundance of penis jokes mainly to juice up the trailer) they might have had themselves a happy little throwaway......
But they stuck firmly to the Summer Movie playbook and vomited out a giant, lumpy mess that richly deserved all the ridicule heaped upon it. The moments of giggly Hal Needham-ish stuff quickly get buried under rivers of toxic CGI lava......
So we recommend this way of viewing for anyone who meets up with "Baywatch"......keep your finger positioned on your remote's 'Fast Forward' button........enjoy the antics between The Rock and Mr.High School Musical........but be ready to hit the "FF" button and skim through everything else. 1 star (*).......oh how we miss you, Hal........
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