Overboard (2018)

The 1987 comedy about amnesia and falling in love gets the gender reversal in this pretty funny remake that highlights the comic styles of leads Eugenio Derbez and Anna Faris.

Leonardo Montenegro is a Mexican-born playboy who lives life on the yacht and canoodling with women on a near 24-hour basis. Kate Sullivan is a struggling single mother working as a pizza delivery driver and a carpet cleaner while she plans to pursue her dream of being a nurse. When Kate is hired to clean Leo’s carpets, he fires her after his demands to get him food are unsuccessful. When Kate is fired from her carpet job as a result, she is extremely upset when her mother can no longer watch her three kids to pursue her dream of being an actress.

When a night of passion leads Leo to fall overboard and lose his memory, he is found, but his sister, who thinks Leo is unable to take over the family business, pretends he is dead so she can take over the business. When Kate learns of the situation, along with best friend Angie, she hatches a plan to get revenge by having Leo pose as her husband and father to her kids. Things go awry at first, but Leo soon begins to become a family man and Kate slowly begins to actually fall for him. What will happen if he regains his memory?

The 1987 film Overboard is a hilarious look at what happens when a rich heiress gains amnesia and after being duped to become a disgruntled man’s wife, she slowly finds herself falling for him. The film would bring the on-screen romance of Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell off-screen as well. While the remake was pretty much unexpected, it does become the latest of a long line of gender-reversal remakes (see Ghostbusters and the upcoming What Men Want) but somehow the film actually works well.

What helps the film is the physical comedy style of Mexican comedian Eugenio Derbez, hot on the heels of his rise to international stardom. The star of Familia P.Luche and Instructions Not Included is hilarious to watch as Leonardo, the playboy who finds himself getting a dose of reality after getting amnesia. The role allows Derbez to do some physical comedy as well as bring his Latin-flavored style comic stylings to the film, bringing a sense of diversity within the cast.

The female version of Kurt Russell’s original comes in the form of comic star Anna Faris, who plays struggling single mom Kate, who is pursuing a dream despite all of her issues. Faris and Derbez play each other off quite well the way Hawn and Russell had done in the original. Even using Leslie Dixon’s original screenplay as inspiration by re-using some lines of the original, the film just adds to the chemistry between the two leads here. The supporting cast, including Eva Longoria as pizzeria owner Angie adds some comic fuel to the fire as she helps make Derbez and Faris carry the film.

The remake of Overboard actually works well with today’s films and it is safe to say, it could be a fun idea to have a double feature with both the 1987 original and this remake as the chemistry between Derbez and Faris helps make this a fun remake that is just about as good as the chemistry between Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell in the original.

WFG RATING: B

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Lionsgate present a 3Pas Studios production in association with Pantelion Films. Director: Rob Greenberg. Producers: Eugenio Derbez, Bob Fisher, and Benjamin Odell. Writers: Bob Fisher, Rob Greenberg, and Leslie Dixon; based on the original 1987 film written by Dixon. Cinematography: Michael Barrett. Editing: Lee Haxall.

Cast: Eugenio Derbez, Anna Faris, Eva Longoria, John Hannah, Swoosie Kurtz, Mel Rodriguez, Josh Segarra, Hannah Nordberg, Alyvia Alyn Lind, Payton Lepinski, Fernando Luján, Cecilia Suárez, Mariana Treviño, Omar Chaparro, Jesús Ochoa, Adrian Uribe.