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With: Eugenio Derbez, Anna Faris, Eva Longoria, John Hannah, Emily Maddison, Swoosie Kurtz, Mel Rodriguez, John Sagarra, Alyvia Alyn Lind, Hannah Nordberg
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Written by: Bob Fisher, Rob Greenberg, based on a story by Leslie Dixon
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Directed by: Rob Greenberg
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MPAA Rating: PG-13 for suggestive material, partial nudity and some language
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Running Time: 112
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Date: 05/04/2018
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All Wet
By Jeffrey M. Anderson
Lazy, stupid, and unfunny, this remake of the 1980s screwball comedy seems to have been made without anyone caring at all. Worse, it manages to be insulting to both the characters and to the audience.
In Overboard, Kate (Anna Faris) is a struggling single mother with three daughters and two jobs: delivering pizza and cleaning carpets. She is also studying for a nurse's exam and needs a break. Hired to clean the carpets on a huge yacht belonging to selfish, unpleasant billionaire Leonardo (Eugenio Derbez), she refuses to bring him a snack and is fired without pay. He also throws her equipment in the ocean.
Later, drunk, Leonardo falls overboard and loses his memory. Kate decides to get her revenge by pretending that he's her husband, taking him home, and making him get a manual labor job and do chores around the house. Eventually, "Leo" settles into his position and learns to like his new life, and even learns to love the girls and Kate. But what will happen when his memory returns and he realizes it's all a ruse?
Garry Marshall's 1987 Overboard at least gave Goldie Hawn a funny role to play as the nasty socialite; this Overboard unwisely switches the roles, making the otherwise hilarious Faris the working class character and thereby taking all the fun away from her. Now she's basically unpleasantly frenzied, and highly unappealing because of her ongoing, extremely mean-spirited lies.
Derbez — a huge star in Mexico looking to make his breakthrough in the U.S. — is all pratfalls and frantic energy, and his "transformation" into a nice guy is extremely difficult to buy, as is the forced, shoehorned chemistry between the two leads. It's embarrassing to think that cross-cultural audiences will be exposed to the worst of both countries in this awful movie.
No one comes out looking good here, on either side of the camera. In one scene, the family watches grandmother (Swoosie Kurtz) performing onstage in The Mikado and one of the daughters comments, "this is horrifying." That completely apt description applies to Overboard in its entirety.
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