The most enduring image from Baywatch, which premiered on NBC in 1989, is surely that of Pamela Anderson running in slow motion toward an unforgiving sea, all steely-eyed determination and windswept locks. In its first trailer, the Baywatch movie adaptation, due in May 2017, manages to both own this trademark and send it up, recreating the hot-heroic slow-mo jog while getting a witty one-liner out of it, too.
The stars of the movie, however, appear not to be the red-suited female guards but Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron, whose mismatched pairing as lifeguarding bros will undoubtedly lead to a bromantic finale. Along the way, Johnson will dive into an ocean that is somehow on fire, we will be asked to laugh at the incongruity of two brawny men riding a bubblegum pink scooter, and there will be ball and boob jokes aplenty.
Johnson plays Mitch Buchannon, played in the TV show by David Hasselhoff, Alexandra Daddario plays Nicole Eggert’s Summer Quinn and Kelly Rohrbach reprises Anderson’s C.J. Parker. The number of opportunities Efron seems to find to parade around shirtless might be getting old by now if he weren’t, save for a handful of misses, funny pretty much every time he does it. That is, if you consider mimicking the voice of one’s own testicles funny, which more of us do than we may be willing to admit.
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