Rob Greenberg, 112 mins, starring: Anna Faris, Eugenio Derbez, Eva Longoria, Emily Maddison, Swoosie Kurtz, John Hannah
Overboard falls headfirst into the murky pool of most pointless remakes of recent years. It’s an amiable but utterly predictable and very soggy romantic comedy that can’t even match the fizz of the first version. (That was the one starring Goldie Hawn as the rich brat who falls off a boat, loses her memory and experiences life on the other side of the tracks, with blue collar carpenter Kurt Russell.)
Here, the genders are switched. The spoilt millionaire is Hispanic playboy, Leonardo 'Leo' Montenegro (Eugenio Derbez), heir to the family industrial fortune. The single mom, desperately trying to pay the bills and look after her three daughters, is Kate Sullivan (Anna Faris.)
Kate is studying to be a nurse while working double shifts delivering pizzas and cleaning offices. She is being run utterly ragged. One of her jobs is to clean the carpets on Leo’s yacht. He treats her with such disdain that she loathes him instantly.
The original, 1987 film was itself derivative - an 80s spin on old Frank Capra and Preston Sturges Hollywood fables about rich folk trading places. The new film feels even more contrived. The comic set-up takes some swallowing. Leo falls off the yacht after trying to retrieve his condoms.
He wakes up on a beach with an “ass full of sand,” remembering nothing. Kate claims him from the hospital, pretending he is her husband. She then ritually humiliates him, setting him to work as cook, babysitter, breadwinner and general dogsbody. He sleeps far away from her bed in a shed in the garden and does back breaking shifts for the local building crew. She tells him he is a recovering alcoholic.
You don’t need to be Nostradamus to predict that Kate and Leo will fall in love for “real” or that Leo will learn a few useful lessons along the way about selflessness, the plight of the working man and the secrets of parenthood. Sure enough, when he receives his first pay cheque, he feels inordinate pride. He also begins to dote on the three girls he thinks are his daughters (even if Kate tells him they are from a sperm donor.)
The two leads are both fine comedic actors. Faris looks a little like Goldie Hawn and shares Hawn’s flair for screwball humour. The writing, though, doesn’t give her much chance to shine. We will see her muttering about “bloody stools” and “swapping fecal matter” as she revises for her medical exams at the same time she is driving around town, delivering pizzas and picking up her kids from school.
At least, she doesn’t face the same slapstick humiliation that Derbez is forced to endure. One moment, he is in the jacuzzi of his yacht, swigging champagne with supermodels. The next, he is running naked through the streets with no idea of his own identity.
When he is first set to work cooking, he slips on the spaghetti and covers himself in tomato sauce. At the building site, he somersaults into a skip and sprays cement all around. The other workers call him “lady hands” and mock him because he has never done a serious day’s manual work in his life.
Overboard is mildly enjoyable in its own undercharged way. The filmmakers try to defend themselves from the charge that their plot line doesn’t hold water by making frequent references to even more leaky and absurd telenovelas (which the male staff in the pizza restaurant watch religiously.)
The supporting actors do their best, among them Eva Longoria as the affable, always opportunistic restaurant boss, Mel Rodriguez as her roly poly husband, and Cecilia Suarez as Leo’s scheming sister, who would far rather that he stayed dead so that she can inherit the family business.
The storytelling becomes increasingly sanctimonious as Leo turns into the perfect blue collar new man. He is equally at home on the building site or in the kitchen, and, most revealing of all, is always ready to pick up the poop when he takes the dog for a walk.
However, the satire at the expense of the idle rich is completely undermined by the film’s determination to ensure that its main characters don’t just have their cake but get to gorge themselves sick on it too.
Overboard hits UK cinemas 22 June.
