Yep, Zac Efron Is Without Shirt In The First ‘Baywatch’ Trailer

The only way to bring a dated ‘90s relic like Baywatch to the big screen in today’s irony-soaked culture is with a giant wink. It worked for the 21 Jump Street reboot, and based on the just-released trailer for the upcoming action comedy, it’ll work here, too. Zac Efron, in a role he was born to play (i.e. shirtless), shows up as Matt Brody, a renegade lifeguard and former Olympian who’s brought in to inject some millennial-flavored juice into the out-of-date Baywatch patrol, much to the chagrin of Mitch Buchanan, played here with typically bulky charisma by Dwayne Johnson. “It’s up to us to restore the Baywatch brand,” a character says to Johnson. Subtlety is not the point.

The trailer makes sure to send up Baywatch’s most lasting impact on pop culture, the slow-motion run, first made famous by Pamela Anderson and recreated here by Kelly Rohrbach, who is taking over for Anderson as C.J. Quinn. In a moment of peak self-awareness, one character calls out the fact that Rohrbach appears to be running in slo-mo. The Seth Gordon-directed movie will feature the requisite cameos from Anderson and David Hasselhoff, while Priyanka Chopra (who's blessing the whole endeavor as the villain), Alexandra Daddario, and Ilfenesh Hadera round out the cast. Baywatch doesn’t hit theaters until May of next year, which is a cold hard truth we’re all just going to have to deal with.