Review Roundup: Critics Weigh In On OVERBOARD

Overboard is a fresh take on the iconic romantic comedy. In a splashy new twist, Overboard focuses on "Leonardo" (Eugenio Derbez), a selfish, spoiled, rich playboy from Mexico's richest family and "Kate" (Anna Faris), a working-class single mom of three hired to clean Leonardo's luxury yacht. After unjustly firing Kate and refusing to pay her, Leonardo falls overboard when partying too hard and wakes up on the Oregon coast with amnesia. Kate shows up at the hospital and, to get payback, convinces Leonardo he is her husband and puts him to work - for the first time in his life. At first miserable and inept, Leonardo slowly settles in. Eventually, he earns the respect of his new "family" and co-workers. But, with Leonardo's billionaire family hot on their trail and the possibility of his memory returning at any moment, will their new family last or will Leonardo finally put the clues together and leave them for good?

The film stars beloved Mexican film and television icon Eugenio Derbez (Instructions Not Included, How to Be A Latin Lover) as Leo, Anna Faris ("Mom," The House Bunny) as Kate and Eva Longoria ("Desperate Housewives") as Theresa. Filmmakers Rob Greenberg ("How I Met Your Mother") and Bob Fisher (Wedding Crashers) teamed up to write and direct based on the 1987 motion picture written by Leslie Dixon. Ben Odell (How to be a Latin Lover) and Derbez produced via their 3Pas Studios.

OVERBOARD hit theaters last week. See what the critics are saying here:

Owen Gleiberman, Variety: "What makes the new version, like the old one, a throwaway worth seeing is that THE FAMILY theme lends it a dimension of novelty (at least, for a formula romcom), lifting it out of the realm of one-on-one amorous narcissism. Even more than the Hawn-Russell version, it's less about two beautiful movie stars giving into the hot sparks between them than it is about a couple of ordinary folks learning to appreciate how much they bounce and ping off each other's company."

Emily Yoshida, Vulture: "For that reason, I couldn't help but be taken by the 2018 Overboard, the new remake starring Anna Faris and Eugenio Derbez. In this version, the gender roles are reversed: Anna Faris plays the Kurt Russell part of a working-class single mom, and Eugenio Derbez plays Leonardo, the playboy billionaire heir whom she convinces is her husband of 15 years after a tumble from his yacht wipes his memory. Derbez (Instructions Not Included, How to Be a Latin Lover), who also produced the film, has become a figurehead for a kind of crossover bilingual studio comedy that has been quietly successful in the last few years while other, more conventional comedies have crashed and burned. Overboard, directed and co-written by sitcom veteran (and Frasier producer, I must add) Rob Greenberg, is at once defiantly old-fashioned and casually cross-cultural. It's also predictable as the day is long and lags considerably in the middle, but that might be more of a genre feature than a bug."

John DeFore, The Hollywood Reporter: "The pic's vision of this odd but happy family is sufficiently warm that we start to worry about the end game; at some point, Leo's going to be outed as an amnesiac billionaire who has been duped by a penniless single mom. The film wrings a couple of laughs from near misses, though these scenes (like the rest of the film) are hardly tailored to Faris' screwball gifts. Maybe Fisher and Greenberg recently fell from a yacht as well, and forgot how funny she can be."

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: "Even by the standards of disbelief-suspending comedy, the remake's plot is damn near impossible to swallow, especially when there's such an abundant lack of chemistry. Or, worse, when Leo turns good guy and starts to enjoy being a poor workslave and also, like, everybody loves him! WTF! Director Rob Greenberg, working from a script that he and Bob Fisher adapted from Leslie Dixon's original story, lacks the sense of pacing and edgy mischief that the late director Garry Marshall demonstrated the first time around. And Derbez, who scored a modest hit last year with the critically-reviled How To Be a Latin Lover, lacks the ability to go for the jugular that his role needs. He's too busy being charming to be a smartass. Faris could have handled the wisecracks fine, but the script gives her male costar all the good lines, leaving the movie's real MVP on the sidelines. Big mistake."

Kate Erbland, IndieWire: "The "Overboard" films (are we now living in an "Overboard" universe?), despite their sheen of light-hearted humor, grapple with one big problem: How do you turn a terrible crime into something cute enough to spawn both romance and comedy? Like its predecessor, Fisher and Greenberg's film almost nails it, thanks to Faris' charming performance as the struggling Kate and Derbez's interpretation of Leo as a jerk who just needs a good kick in the pants. Once Kate and her best friend Theresa (Eva Longoria) discover that a single man with no memory of his life is making lives miserable at the local hospital, they hatch a plan to convince Leonardo that he's Kate's devoted spouse, turning him into the house-husband of her dreams."

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