With just a couple weeks until its release, Baywatch has been given a new trailer desperate to sell this thing to us. This latest preview is red-band, meant to show off just why the film earned its R-rating. Really, though, it just makes you wonder why the film is rated at all. From its jokes to its painfully obvious green-screen, it truly looks like it should go straight to a boastfully “unrated” DVD release under the ever-cheapening National Lampoon banner.
While an R rating on a heavily-sexualized beach franchise might seem like a recipe for seeing a lot of skin, Baywatch seems to have used its rating instead for some forced, lazy cussing and crude but not particularly funny anatomical references. It’s got a script that feels like it written on the fly by a stand-up bombing on-stage. Each groan this trailer produces just sends it further into a nervous frenzy of ball jokes and tacking a “fuckin'” on every sentence. In translating the sensation of panicked drowning to comedy, Baywatch appears fairly successful.
We’ll see whether it can maintain that impressive level of strained flailing when the film hits theaters May 25.
