Overboard

The Amnesia of Ambition

Remakes are the ghosts of cinema’s past, haunting the present with a demand to be remembered, yet often lacking the vitality to live again. They arrive bearing the burden of nostalgia, tasked with translating a bygone era’s sensibilities into a modern dialect. Rob Greenberg’s 2018 iteration of *Overboard* attempts this translation by flipping the gender dynamic of the 1987 Garry Marshall original. Where Goldie Hawn once played the imperious heiress tamed by Kurt Russell’s blue-collar carpenter, here we have Eugenio Derbez as Leonardo, a Mexican playboy whose fall from grace—and his yacht—lands him in the vengeful care of Anna Faris’s struggling single mother, Kate. The resulting film is a fascinating, if uneven, artifact of cultural negotiation, caught between the desire to update a problematic premise and the safety of formulaic comedy.



Visually, Greenberg directs the film with the flat, bright efficiency of a television sitcom, a medium where he cut his teeth. The cinematography lacks the gritty, lived-in texture that made the original’s Elk Cove feel like a place where sawdust and sea salt were permanent fixtures. Instead, the film operates in a sanitized reality where poverty is "movie clean" and wealth is depicted through the glossy, sterile lens of a telenovela. This is not accidental; the film smartly leans into the tropes of Latin American soap operas, using them as a meta-commentary on the absurdity of the amnesia plot itself. However, this aesthetic choice often robs the film of atmospheric weight, making the stakes feel as artificial as the premise.



The heart of the film lies not in the romance, which feels curiously desexualized compared to the original, but in its attempt to rewrite the class and racial dynamics of the 1980s. By casting Derbez, a superstar of Mexican cinema, as the wealthy oppressor, the film subverts the typical Hollywood hierarchy where Latino characters are relegated to the service industry. Leonardo’s interactions with his construction crew—men he initially views as beneath him—provide the film’s most genuine moments of warmth. Yet, the central conflict remains thorny. The script struggles to reconcile the inherent cruelty of gaslighting an amnesiac with the tone of a family-friendly romp. Faris, a gifted comedienne capable of manic brilliance, is here constrained by a role that requires her to be the straight woman to Derbez’s broad physical comedy. Her performance feels weighed down by the moral dubiousness of her character’s actions, a shadow the film never quite manages to dispel with sunshine and slapstick.



Ultimately, *Overboard* (2018) is a film at war with its own existence. It seeks to be progressive by reversing gender roles and celebrating Mexican identity, yet it remains shackled to a narrative structure built on deception and manipulation. It is a pleasant enough diversion, buoyed by Derbez’s undeniable charisma and a refreshing linguistic fluidity that sees characters switch effortlessly between English and Spanish. But like its protagonist, the film seems to suffer from a form of identity loss, unsure if it wants to be a sharp satire of wealth or a comforting replay of a familiar tune. It floats amiably on the surface, but refuses to dive deep enough to find any new treasure.