Review: ‘Overboard’ Remake Is So Sweet It Makes the Original Look Edgy

Before landing a plum role on what has proved to be a successful network TV sitcom (CBS’ “Mom,” also starring Allison Janney), Anna Faris was cherished, largely by schnooks like myself, as an underappreciated comedic treasure. (See, for example, her work as a weed enthusiast in desperate search of a stash in 2007’s “Smiley Face.”) Eugenio Derbez is a wildly popular Mexican comedic performer making inroads in the United States; his 2017 effort in this campaign, “How to Be a Latin Lover,” was at its best an amiably amusing trifle in which Derbez was the main laugh generator.

So building a gender-reversed remake of the 1987 film “Overboard” — at that time a lively vehicle for Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell — around Faris and Derbez is not a deplorable notion on the face of it. The original is, after all, well-liked but not quite revered, so there’s little risk of sacrilege. The resultant movie, directed by Rob Greenberg from a script Greenberg and Bob Fisher adapted from Leslie Dixon’s original story, is not deplorable either. At first, it’s just kind of flat, from the writing to the lighting.

Faris plays Kate, a single mom in coastal Oregon working two jobs and studying for a nursing exam. Assigned to clean the carpet on a docked yacht, she at first banters with, then alienates, the snotty Mexican playboy Leonardo Montenegro, the ne’er-do-well son of the third-richest man in the world. Their confrontation costs Kate her gig and puts her in debt for some expensive cleaning equipment. When Leonardo falls off his yacht and washes to shore without memory, Kate’s boss and gal pal Theresa (Eva Longoria) encourages Kate to claim the amnesiac as her husband and make him work for her.

Leonardo (dubbed Leo by Kate and her three daughters) soon discovers the man he never was, and never even considered being: a hardworking breadwinner, a loving dad, an ever-improving cook. (The small construction crew with which Kate has arranged a job for him is mostly Latin American; one noteworthy feature of the movie is that about a third of its dialogue is in Spanish.) None of the proceedings are sidesplittingly funny, but they grow increasingly sweet-natured. The most remarkable aspect of this movie is its perhaps unwitting gentleness. The meanest joke in the movie concerns the lack of musical ability of one of Leonardo’s siblings.

A colleague remarked, as we were exiting the screening, that perhaps right now is not the worst time to spend a couple of hours with a movie that’s pretty much all marshmallow. I can’t entirely disagree, conceptually, but before you make your decision, consider the fact that this remake actually makes the innocuous original look edgy by comparison.

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'Overboard'

Rated PG-13. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In English, Spanish and French, with English subtitles.