Overboard

There's a simple reason that the plot of Overboard sounds like the sort of over-the-top, highly implausible, downright cruel and unscrupulous stuff you'd see in some wrongheaded comedy from the '80s. The new Overboard is a gender-swapped reimagining of the 1987 comedy of the same name, the one where a stuck-up heiress (Goldie Hawn) suffers amnesia and gets convinced by a vengeful carpenter (Kurt Russell) that she's a blue-collar wife and mother.

Overboard in 2018 is mainly a vehicle for its star/producer, Eugenio Derbez. Just as in Instructions Not Included and How to Be a Latin Lover, Derbez goes the playboy route. He's Leonardo Montenegro, the spoiled-rotten bad boy of a rich Mexican family who tosses Kate Sullivan (Anna Faris), a pizza-delivering, carpet-cleaning, single mom of three who literally gets tossed off his yacht when she refuses to serve him a mango.

Karma, of course, hits Leonardo like a mofo when he falls off the boat. He ends up washed up ashore, with no recollection of who he is. Kate's best gal pal (Eva Longoria) persuades Kate to convince Leonardo they're husband and wife and to take him home so he can help out around the house.

At their core, both Overboards are traditional rich-person-learns-how-to-be-a-real-person farces, the type of films Frank Capra and Preston Sturges used to direct in their sleep. But that premise is hopelessly jacked up. Faris is too likable a presence to despise no matter who she's playing, but Kate is essentially committing kidnapping and, later, when wife and husband get conjugal, rape. Still, Derbez displays an amusing, almost neurotic vulnerability that reminds me of Gene Wilder back in his prime.