Movie Review: 'Overboard'

Kate (Anna Faris) is a struggling single mom who works two jobs while raising three daughters. She’s also attending night school to become a nurse. Things take a turn for the worse when Kate is hired to clean carpets aboard a boat belonging to the billionaire playboy son of a construction magnate, Leonardo (Eugenio Derbez). When the billionaire asks Kate to get him a snack, she says no and he pushes her off his boat and destroys her cleaning equipment.

The story of Overboard kicks in when Leonardo gets drunk and falls off of his boat. When he wakes up, Leonardo doesn’t remember his name or that he’s a billionaire playboy. Seeing the story on the news, Kate’s best friend Theresa (Eva Longoria) encourages her to pretend that Leonardo is her husband and using some convenient chicanery, Leonardo winds up at Kate’s home, working for her friend’s construction company and helping watch the kids.

Overboard is a remake of a 1987 comedy starring Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell and directed by hack director extraordinaire Garry Marshall. That film is equally as laugh-free as this remake. In that movie, the genders are flipped with Goldie Hawn as the privileged princess and Russell as a single dad construction worker. At the very least, the sequel is less misogynistic or outright hateful than the original.

Anna Faris is a very funny lady and in the right role, she shines. Here, however, in this extended sitcom, directed by frequent sitcom director Rob Greenberg, Faris’s efforts are futile as she battles her unfunny co-star Derbez. How Eugenio Derbez continues to find lead roles is baffling to me. Derbez is not funny and has not been funny one time during his career in America.

For some reason, Overboard kicks in a pair of unfunny side plots that include Leondardo’s family squabbling over their company. Leonardo has two sisters, one of whom wants to run the family business. That sister fakes Leonardo’s death for her benefit in a plot that has even less joy than the central plot. The other unnecessary plot involves Swoozie Kurtz as Kate’s mom, a wannabe actress.

The trailer has the only funny gag in the entirety of Overboard. Eugenio Derbez built his comedy empire in Mexico off of slapstick gags and thus his struggle with a wheelbarrow in this movie earned, at the very least, a smile. Other than that, Overboard is a comedy wasteland where laughs are almost non-existent. Overboard is like a comedy desert in which laughs are merely a mirage.

I should say, I wasn’t a fan of the original Overboard either, an opinion that is shockingly not shared by many others. Indeed, in researching this review I have found that a number of people see the Goldie Hawn-Kurt Russell as a modern classic. I do not understand where that sentiment comes from. The Garry Marshall Overboard is horrific with Kurt Russell’s performance genuinely, desperately unfunny and Goldie Hawn desperately squeezing what few laughs there are in that film out of her thin character.

An example of the comedy wasteland that is Overboard 2018, a scene in which Leonardo’s sister is faking her brother’s death she attempts to get the police to say he was eaten by a shark. The police officer on the phone is shown on screen in the other half of this call and we see that his name is Brody, a nod toward Jaws that would be a mere groaner if they hadn’t tacked on a gag in which the cop is missing an arm. Ugh!

The nicest thing I can say about Overboard is that it improves on the heinous original by being less hateful. That’s a small improvement but an improvement nonetheless. Beyond that, Overboard 2018 is a shouty, unfunny, unnecessary remake of an already terrible movie. A modern comedy directed as if it were supposed to be a sitcom that accidentally was dropped into theaters.