Baywatch(2017)

SHORT VERSION:
Leeds has been selling flakka through the Huntley Club to bankroll her real scheme to privatize all of Emerald Bay. She has been buying out the other property owners, and the ones who refused to sell were blackmailed into selling thanks to her having her tech guy, Dave, hack into their personal accounts and dig up dirt that could be used against them (she ended up having Dave killed when he tried to blackmail her). She also has paid off the local politicians to make her plan happen, which included Councilman Rodriguez (whom she also had killed for trying to blackmail her). However, the last property owner, Murray Chen, wouldn’t sell to her, nor did he have anything that he could be blackmailed with, so she had him kidnapped and brought onto her yacht intending to kill him later, since his death would cause his properties to revert back to the city and she could buy them that way.

After realizing that Mitch and his co-workers were investigating her, she bribes Captain Thorpe to fire Mitch and promote Matt to Lieutenant to try to stop it. Thorpe does so, and he also tries to make Matt take his eyes off Leeds by telling him that he will screw with his probation if he doesn’t focus on doing his job and keeping the other lifeguards in line. However, Matt picks up where Mitch left off, and he soon gets all the information on Leeds’ plans when he has Ronnie hack into her personal account. After the guys relay their findings to Stephanie, C.J., and Summer, they go to a party Leeds is holding on her yacht to commemorate the Huntley Club’s impending expansion in order to find the flakka and free Chen. They succeed at both tasks, but Matt gets captured by Leeds and her thugs. When they try to drown Matt in the harbor (during which Leeds tells him of how she bribed Thorpe), he is saved by Mitch, who was called to the scene by Summer after the flakka was located. He and Mitch pursue Leeds onto a barge she is having fireworks launched from, and with help from C.J. and Ronnie operating the fireworks, Mitch ultimately uses one of them to blow Leeds up. When the guys return to shore to meet up with their comrades and the police, Sgt. Ellerbee apologizes to Mitch for not believing his stories about the shady goings-on at the Huntley Club, and when Thorpe suddenly shows up to chew out Mitch for being on “his” beach, he is soon arrested.

C.J. and Ronnie become a couple, as do Matt and Summer. Mitch is reinstated as Lieutenant, and at Baywatch’s next meeting, he tells Matt, Summer, and Ronnie that they are no longer trainees. He also introduces them to their new Captain, (the original) Casey Jean Parker.

LONG VERSION:
One day, Mitch (Dwayne Johnson) and Matt (Zac Efron) infiltrate the Huntley Club in disguise and find out that Leeds (Priyanka Chopra) has been smuggling the flakka from her yacht, the Star Ship, into her club by hiding them inside barrels of fish, after which they get processed. Mitch calls Sgt. Ellerbee (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) to inform him about this and tells him to come down to the club immediately, but Ellerbee tells him that another dead body has just washed up on his beach (that of Ronnie’s [Jon Bass] friend Dave [Hannibal Buress], who was working for Leeds as her tech guy until she had him murdered for trying to blackmail her, and his body was put in the sea by her men and set up to look like he died from a shark attack). Mitch says that this body, along with the earlier-found body of Councilman Rodriguez (Oscar Nunez), must be connected to the Huntley and he is sure that they are behind all of this. However, Captain Thorpe (Rob Huebel) approaches Ellerbee during the call, and Ellerbee puts Mitch on speakerphone so he can let Thorpe know that he is talking to Mitch. After Mitch states his belief that the Huntley is behind all of the problems in Emerald Bay, Thorpe finally speaks by ordering Mitch to stop with all the Huntley stuff and tells him to meet him back at headquarters.

Mitch goes there with Matt and the rest of the Baywatch crew, and Thorpe fires Mitch for not being at the lifeguard tower during his shift and trying to play “police officer” again despite being warned once already to not do so. He also makes Matt the new Lieutenant, even though he doesn’t want the job, and he warns Matt that he will screw with his probation if he doesn’t stick to his job and help him keep the other lifeguards in line. Before heading home, Mitch tells the others to help Matt figure out why there is another dead body and how Leeds is bringing drugs into Emerald Bay, then gives Matt the key to the lifeguard tower. Mitch becomes a salesperson at Sprint, and Matt continues to spy on the Huntley Club and soon finds another small pouch of flakka on the beach. He calls Mitch on his CB radio asking him to come back, saying that he could really use his help.

A couple of days later, Mitch is paid a visit by his mentor, the original Mitch Buchannon (David Hasselhoff), who tells Mitch that he doesn’t just protect the bay; he IS the bay, and the bay needs him. That same day, Matt spots a sand grifter stealing people’s belongings using a cooler with a mechanized opening on the bottom, and after tackling the thief and frightening him off, he confiscates the cooler. He later takes it with him to Ellerbee’s office and uses it to steal a file off his desk containing photos of Dave’s corpse. Knowing that Summer (Alexandra Daddario) studied marine biology, he shows her the photos and asks if all of Dave’s wounds are shark bites, and she confirms that some of them look like knife wounds. Ronnie then sees the photos and tells them that that is Dave and he used to work with him doing tech stuff, and Dave had told him that he was working with Leeds on something for the Huntley Club. Matt accepts that Mitch was right about the club; Rodriguez’s and Dave’s bodies were dead before they hit the water, and Leeds must have conspired to set Mitch up and get him fired and will likely target them next. He then takes Ronnie to headquarters so he can have him use one of the computers there to get information on Leeds, and using his own hacking expertise, Ronnie accesses Leeds’ personal account and finds out everything about her operation.

That night, Matt and Ronnie inform Summer, Stephanie (Ilfenesh Hadera), and C.J. (Kelly Rohrbach) that the Huntley Club is indeed a front for a giant drug operation, and the drug money is bankrolling Leeds’ true goal of acquiring real estate; she is seeking to privatize all of Emerald Bay. She has been buying out the other business owners in the bay, and if any of them refused to sell, she had Dave hack into their personal accounts in order to dig up any dirt that could be used to blackmail them into selling. She has also been bribing the local politicians to assist with her goal, which included Rodriguez (before he, too, met his demise after attempting to blackmail Leeds). Murray Chen (Clem Cheung) was the only business owner who managed to hold out (because not only would he not sell to Leeds, but he had nothing that Leeds could blackmail him with), but if anything happens to Chen, his properties will go back to the city, which will enable Leeds to buy them. Summer says that Chen must be warned, but Matt replies that he already tried; no one has seen him for days. However, Leeds will be having a party on the Star Ship tonight to celebrate the impending expansion of the Huntley, and he firmly believes that she has Chen on that yacht. He then says that they are all going to the party, and he and Summer will look for the flakka while Ronnie, C.J., and Stephanie will look for Chen.

After the quintet get on board the Star Ship, Matt and Summer sneak out to the stern, and Matt dives into the water and goes under the yacht where – following a diagram of the yacht that Ronnie got from Leeds’ account – he finds the flakka stashed in secret compartments in the bottom of the hull. He heads back up and reports his discovery to Summer and tells her to call Mitch, but after she says that he hasn’t been answering his phone since he was fired, he tells her to call him on his CB radio since he always listens in on that, and he also tells her to tell Mitch to come meet them at the marina at 9:00 p.m. She heads into the bridge upstairs and communicates to Mitch over the radio that they found the drugs on Leeds’ yacht, but then she is forced to hide when a nearby guard comes into her peripheral vision. Meanwhile, Stephanie, C.J., and Ronnie sneak upstairs themselves, and after Stephanie kayos another guard there, they find Chen tied up and gagged in a room connected to the bridge, and he tells them that Leeds was going to kill him. Another guard suddenly enters and tries to hold them up at gunpoint, but Summer hits him in the head from behind with a fire extinguisher and knocks him out. She tells everyone that Matt found the flakka, and Stephanie decides that she and Summer will get Chen off the boat and call Ellerbee while C.J. decides that she and Ronnie will stay so they can keep an eye on Leeds.

As Matt is getting dressed back up in his suit, Leeds’ top henchmen Frankie (Amin Joseph) and Leon (Jack Kesy) appear behind him, knock him out, and tie him up. Frankie reports this to Leeds and she comes out to see Matt herself, but as she is gloating over his capture, she spots Chen escaping with Stephanie and Summer. She berates the thugs for letting this happen before telling them that they must initiate “Plan B”, then instructs them to contact her chopper and have it meet them at a barge where she is having some fireworks launched from, knowing that they must now flee. They put Brody in a cage and take him out in a smaller boat into the harbor, but C.J. and Ronnie see this and radio this to Summer. Leeds wakes Matt up, and after she informs him that she had bribed Thorpe to fire Mitch and promote him to Lieutenant, she and the thugs kick his cage overboard. Thankfully, before Matt can drown, he is rescued by Mitch. As they get onto Mitch’s boat, Matt tells him where Leeds is headed, but before they go over to the barge, Mitch radios Ronnie and tells him to figure out a way to launch the fireworks so Leeds’ helicopter can’t pick her up.

Just as Mitch and Matt reach the barge and come under fire from Frankie and Leon, Ronnie hacks into the fireworks console’s interface (after getting a big kiss of encouragement from C.J.) and gets the show started. Matt fights and knocks out Frankie while Mitch fights Leon to the top of the barge before throwing him down to one of the lower levels, but then Mitch gets shot in the chest by Leeds and falls into the water moments before Ronnie runs out of fireworks to shoot. Leeds then kills Leon for his incompetence, but just as Matt faces off with her, Mitch suddenly appears. Leeds goes behind Matt and puts her gun to his head, then starts to ascend a ladder behind her so she can get onto her chopper when its rope ladder comes down far enough. However, C.J. suddenly finds a big red button on the console that will shoot off a bigger round of fireworks, and she flicks a switch next to it to start powering it up. As Mitch notices a nearby control box activating in response, he says a bunch of nonsense to distract Leeds so the power can reach maximum before kicking up one of the mortar tubes and aiming it at her. Leeds tries to shoot him again, but Matt deflects it, and Leeds discovers that that was her last bullet. Matt then hits the ground shortly before Ronnie presses the red button to set off the fireworks, and the Roman candle from Mitch’s tube strikes Leeds and blows her to bloody bits. Mitch then explains to Matt that he has survived by giving himself an adrenaline boost through stinging himself with a poisonous Devil’s Urchin (of which a bunch of them were seen clinging to the barge), which he then pulls off his back and shows him.

Mitch and Matt return to the marina to meet up with their comrades, and they find the police questioning the partygoers and putting Frankie into a squad car. After Summer cures Mitch of the urchin’s poison, Ellerbee comes up to Mitch and apologizes for doubting his stories about the Huntley’s illegal activities, but he assures Ellerbee that they are no hard feelings. Thorpe then shows up and orders Mitch to get off his beach or he will have him arrested, but Matt gets Thorpe’s attention and decks him before Mitch informs him that he is the one under arrest.

In the days that follow, Ronnie and C.J. go steady, as do Matt and Summer, and Mitch is reinstated as Lieutenant. At Baywatch’s next meeting, Mitch returns to Matt the Olympic gold medal that he purposely threw away a few days ago to show his commitment to the team, then tells him, Summer, and Ronnie that they are now full-fledged members of Baywatch. He also introduces the team to their new Captain: Casey Jean (Pamela Anderson).