Oh Kristen Bell. You are a big star. Why are you in this movie, The Lifeguard, something I have never heard about and went straight to DVD?
Is it Dax Shepard‘s fault? I bet it is Dax’s fault. He is a jerk. Don’t let him put you in bad movies. You are lucky you avoided Brother’s Justice. I swear, if Hit and Run had been horrible, those two movies would have killed his career.
Just saying. Watch out Kristen.
“No, you watch out! No one talks bad about MY MAN!” – Kristen, if she were a proud black woman.
Leigh (Kristen Bell) is going through a midlife crisis. She went to college, was valedictorian, but ended up quitting her New York job and moving back to Connecticut, her home, where she last felt happy. By mid life crisis, I should note she is less than 30, so this is just some other weird event in her life. Or she is not going to live past 60. Shit.
Either way. Sad times, so she goes to live with her parents again, and rekindle with her old friends (Mamie Gummer, Martin Starr, Joshua Harto).
Heck, she even gets a job as a lifeguard. Her old high school job. Making over 9 bucks an hour. Hooray!
But then something strange happens. During her identity crisis, she finds comfort in another individual. Someone who goes by the name of Little Jason (David Lambert), son of Big Jason, the pool owner. They start a fling unexpectedly, and have copious amounts of sexual intercourse. And he is only sixteen.
Yep. Sixteen! True love, yo.
Sometimes it is a good idea to do that gender reversal thing for romance movies. Does it still work if an older man was the lifeguard and it was a sixteen year old girl? No, heck no. That’s bad. Very bad. Kristen has a really creepy character it turns out, and no one around them realizes it until one individual does by the end. Good ole society, being programmed into thinking that is at least a bit okay. She just represents someone in society.
The movie took awhile to get to the love interest between her and the kid, slowly building up, as she just wandered around her home trying to find stuff to do. And guys to do, I guess.
Too slow. This movie dragged on, for a story that ended up being pretty simple. The thing that gets me is that none of the characters really feel believable. They try to explain why she quit her job and moved home, but it just didn’t seem correct. I couldn’t believe it. It is like they had the idea of someone move back home, but not a great reason why and it was an after thought.
The later scenes between her and David Lambert were pretty steamy, I will give it that, but at the same time, it felt incredibly weird. Damn gender reversal analysis. It ruined a potentially good thing.
No, I am not saying the movie would have been good without it. Too slow, too much meh acting, too much nothing over all. An easy one to skip over and really I’d rather pretend it didn’t exist.