The 1987 film Overboard, directed by the late Gary Marshall, starred real life partners Goldie Hawn (Snatched) and Kurt Russell as an spoiled heiress and a heated handyman who takes his revenge on her when she suffers from amnesia. Despite its slightly dodgy politics and Hawn being 1256 years old at the time it was an enjoyable enough romp. What no one was crying out for was a remake and so sure enough 32 years later we have a remake with the roles reversed.
Overboard 2018 has Anna Faris as single mum of three girls (the cute young one , the stroppy teen and the anonymous middle one) and working two jobs one of which is as a cleaner on the yacht of a lazy playboy who spends his time indulging his whim for endless champagne and witless glamour models. The playboy is played by Eugenio Derbez, a huge star in the Spanish speaking world but who means little outside of it and this film is defiantly aimed at that market because at least a third of the film is in Spanish with subtitles . But Derbez as the Spanish lothario is no Antonio Banderas. It’s Faris, having been cheated out of the money she’s owed for the work that she’s done on the yacht who decides to get her own back when he suffers amnesia and she tricks him into believing they’re now husband and wife getting him to do some hard graft for the first time in his over pampered life. And what follows is a whole load of comic moments…………except they don’t. For a light comedy this is remarkably laugh free with the first half decent joke taking an hour to appear in and the second laugh being in the credits sequence provided by John Hannah as a stereotypical Scots drunk. In fact it seems that Hannah realised that having been wasted in the rest of the film he threw caution to the wind and enjoyed a bit of ad-libbing knowing that filming was over and he’d be escaping that film set pretty soon. You can imagine Melania Trump behaving the same way once her divorce has come through.
The problem at the centre of this unwanted remake is that there is little chemistry between the two leads and what made the original work was the real life couple of Hawn and Russell and Overboard 2018 would have been markedly better if Faris and her now ex husband Chris Pratt (Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom)were in the roles. Faris is a great light comic actress but is badly served here. What we have instead is a film that’s gone overboard with Derbez mugging away for laughs but leaves the viewer underwhelmed.
Here’s the trailer…….
