Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is hoping to get the last laugh on critics who are lambasting his new movie “Baywatch.”
Johnson, who plays Mitch Buchannon in the big-screen reboot of the David Hasselhoff water-safety series, took to Twitter on Thursday to make light of the far-less-than-positive critical reception that the film has received, declaring, “People just want to laugh & have fun.”
Johnson offered his assessment after being informed that the film had inched up from a 13 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes to a whopping 18 percent. (As of this writing, the film has further inched up to 21 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, though it has an audience rating of 65 percent.)
Yay positive upticks ????
Fans LOVE the movie. Critics HATE it. What a glaring disconnect. People just want to laugh & have fun. #Baywatch??”????????? https://t.co/GrPgdevRuz— Dwayne Johnson (@TheRock) May 25, 2017
“Yay positive upticks,” Johnson wrote, accompanied by a laughing emoji. “Fans LOVE the movie. Critics HATE it. What a glaring disconnect. People just want to laugh & have fun. #Baywatch.”
So far the film, which also stars Zac Efron, has received drubbings such as: “‘Baywatch’ is surprisingly without sexism or condescension: It’s equal-opportunity stupid,” courtesy of Slate critic Dana Stevens, and “‘Baywatch’ is no day on the beach,” from the keyboard of Minneapolis Star-Tribune writer Colin Covert.
It hasn’t all been bad news for “Baywatch” on the critical front, however; Time critic Stephanie Zacharek declared the film to be “a lot of fun,” although not before calling it “lightweight, a tiny bit crude and a trillion grains of sand away from anything approaching realism.”
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On the box-office front, “Baywatch” rang up $1.25 million from 2,554 screens in Wednesday previews.