8/10 - funny, sexy, and attention-grabbing, this action comedy is good for some mindless entertainment

Okay, that sounds rather harsh but to me 'Baywatch' really was that bad. The original series was not exactly great, was very silly and can be easily criticised, but it at least was from memory sort of fun and had some campy charm.

Something that 'Baywatch' (2017) completely and utterly fails to do, it actually came across that nobody involved had actually seen the show and only heard about it. Really though, 'Baywatch' is better seen on its own terms and it even fails spectacularly on that front. Have said a few times recently that 2017 was a very hit and miss year for films (from personal opinion),'Baywatch' is, to me, along with 'The Emoji Movie', 'The Mummy', 'Stratton', 'Fifty Shades Darker', 'Flatliners', 'Eat Locals' and 'Transformers: The Last Knight' one of the year's worst, and it's the worst of the lot.

'Baywatch' has only one thing that's semi-decent and that is Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, he fits his role well and at least tries to give the film some energy and charisma. All that effort feels wasted however because his character is so weakly written and his material even weaker than that.

The rest of the acting is dreadful. Zac Efron's comic timing is completely lost at sea here and he fails to make his character interesting or likable. Then there's the supremely irritating Jon Bass and Priyanka Chopra portraying the single most insipid villain of the year. There are some lovely-looking ladies here, but their acting is sophomoric in vapid roles that never feel real, eye-rolling dialogue and in a few cases limited screen time. Alexandria Daddario is particularly wronged in all those areas. The cameos from the likes of David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson may have been intended to be affectionate and nostalgic but were actually neither, instead they were useless in cameos that were clearly shoe-horned in to provide some clumsy connection to the original series.

Despite the near-uniformly poor performances, they are in all fairness saddled with everything else failing even worse than they do. The writing is particularly bad here in a strong contender for the worst script of the year, with dialogue that would even be beneath actors and actresses who can't act their way out of a paper bag and truly laboured and excessively crude jokes that throughout all land with a sickening thud than soar with hilarity. Just for the record, crude humour is not always a bad thing but it depends on how it's executed. Plus there are a lot of great comedies out there that make me laugh every time, so it would be unfair to accuse me or anybody else who hated the film of not having a sense of humour. The crudeness, dumbness and complete lack of taste are just far too much to stomach in 'Baywatch' to the point it's vomit-inducing, and there is no sharpness, wit or subtlety of any kind in a completely laughter-free and distasteful film.

Nothing good to say about the story either, which is not just predictable but even more problematically it's shallow, not the easiest to follow and lifelessly paced. And before anybody defending 'Baywatch' screaming and preaching don't take it so seriously, please try and take on board that those who hated the film knew exactly what to expect and watched it expecting a silly turn-your-brain-off-at-the-door sort of film but got a film that took itself much too seriously to judge it on that front.

It's a very cheap-looking film too, especially in the shoddy editing and obvious and abused use of green-screen. Even the scenery is flat. The soundtrack is forgettable at best and there is not a single interesting, fun or likable character, being either personality-free or annoying. As for the direction, what direction? All in all, awful way in every way apart from Johnson. 1/10 Bethany Cox

I will say this for the film version of Baywatch. You can't say it wasn't keeping up with the times. Villainess Priyanka Chopra seems to be based on Ivanka Trump and those who paid to see this and rent this I think will recognize same.

Dwayne Johnson steps into the role that David Hasselhoff did on the small screen, Mitch Buchanon mentor and trainer of lifeguards. He's getting a new recruit in Zac Efron former Olympic champion whose reputation for being too much a party boy has preceded him. His joining Baywatch is a kind of community service.

On TV the Baywatch cast always got into things that had a most peripheral connection to the beach. Here Johnson says this is part of our mission. Which has him bumping up against real cops instead of how it was on TV.

Priyanka Chopra is a fabulously rich woman with her fingers in a lot of pies and her objective is to privatize their beloved beach. I guess she wants her own little Mar-a-Lago in California. But the Baywatch crew will stop here no matter how many she corrupts.

John Bass has a few moments as the goofy lifeguard with tech smarts and the beautiful boys and girls are there as they were on TV.

I think the film would have been better had it played it far more straight.