8 / 10
Overboard is among the strangest romantic comedies ever made and among the most popular.
Garry Marshall directed the 1987 original. Goldie Hawn plays Joanna Stayton, a wealthy heiress who falls off her yacht, loses her memory, and is taken in by Dean Proffitt, a carpenter played by Kurt Russell whom she’d previously refused to pay for renovations on her boat. Dean tells her she’s his wife. She believes him.
She lives as his wife and stepmother to his four kids for the next six weeks until her memory returns. The premise is morally indefensible. The film is also charming, mostly because Russell and Hawn were already a real couple and their chemistry carries the audience past the kidnapping plot.
The original makes me laugh and makes me wince, and the laughing wins. I don’t think this premise should work at all, and every time Hawn snaps at Russell or softens toward his kids, I forget that it bothers me. That’s the magic of two people who clearly liked each other, and it’s why I rate this one as high as I do.
The 2018 remake, directed by Rob Greenberg, flips the gender. Eugenio Derbez plays the wealthy heir who falls overboard. Anna Faris plays the working-class single mother who tells him he’s her husband. The gender flip doesn’t entirely solve the moral problem. It does make the power dynamics easier to swallow because a working-class woman doing this to a wealthy man feels less predatory than a working-class man doing it to a wealthy woman. The remake is competent and undistinguished.
Why the Original Works
Russell and Hawn had been together since 1983.
The film was an excuse to put them on screen together for two hours doing what looked suspiciously like their actual relationship dynamic. The kidnapping plot is the structural delivery mechanism for the real content, a movie about two famous people who liked each other working out a comedy routine on camera. The chemistry is the whole film.
Hawn was forty-one. She’d been a major movie star for twenty years and was producing as well as starring, and I think this is her at her best. Joanna goes from imperious heiress to working-class mother across the runtime, and Hawn plays both ends with conviction. Russell plays Dean as a man whose kidnapping scheme starts as petty revenge and turns into actual affection for the woman he’s deceiving, and I buy every step of that turn.
For Writers
Real chemistry between performers can sell premises that would otherwise be unworkable. Russell and Hawn were a couple in real life and brought their actual dynamic to the screen. The audience reads this even without knowing the biography. The lesson is that the relationships between your characters need to feel lived in. If you can’t get the equivalent of Russell-Hawn off-screen chemistry, you have to write the relationship into existence on the page. Time spent on the small moments between characters is rarely wasted.
The Premise Problem
Dean tells Joanna she’s his wife. Joanna believes him. The film glosses over what this is, the deception of a vulnerable person without her consent. The 1987 audience accepted the premise as comedy. Modern audiences are less willing to do so. The 2018 remake tried to address this by flipping the genders, hoping that a poorer woman tricking a wealthier man would feel less predatory. The flip helps but doesn’t entirely fix the problem.
The original’s defense, weak as it is, is that Joanna was a terrible person before the kidnapping and the film argues she becomes a better person through her false marriage. This is the kind of argument romantic comedies make. The audience either accepts it or doesn’t. Most viewers accept it because the film is funny and the leads are charming.
I have to squint past the revenge scheme at the start. It makes me uncomfortable, and with anyone other than Hawn and Russell in those roles I’d have given up on it. They win me over anyway, and I’m a little annoyed with myself for letting them.
For Writers
A morally compromised premise can sustain a story only as long as the characters’ specific charm overcomes the audience’s objections. Overboard works because Hawn and Russell are charming enough that the audience suspends judgment. Less charming leads in the same script would have produced an uncomfortable film. The lesson is that the line between rom-com and hostage drama is sometimes drawn by the performers instead of by the script. If your premise is morally complicated, casting becomes part of the writing.
The Remake
The 2018 version exists because someone at the studio noticed the premise could be inverted to address modern concerns about gender and class. Anna Faris is good.
Eugenio Derbez is good. I liked the Latino-Anglo cultural element, which the original didn’t have. What I missed is the chemistry. Faris and Derbez are working actors who like each other professionally, and that’s a long way from a real couple in love.
The remake made approximately ninety million dollars worldwide on a twelve million dollar budget. It was a commercial success. It hasn’t entered the cultural memory the way the original did. The reason is the same reason most remakes don’t stick: the original had an energy that came from circumstances no remake can replicate.
For Writers
A remake competes against the original audience’s memory of the original. The remake has to be considerably better than the original to displace it. Most remakes are competent versions of a story that already exists. The lesson is that remaking work that the audience remembers fondly is structurally difficult. If you take on a remake, you need a clear answer to why this version needs to exist. The remake of Overboard never answers that question convincingly.
Craft Note
The housework montage is the film’s central character-transformation craft. Goldie Hawn’s amnesiac heiress learns blue-collar labor (laundry, cooking, construction) across specific physical sequences instead of through dialogue. The montage shows how romantic comedy can earn character change through staged work instead of through emotional confession. The character becomes someone else by doing things she’s never done.
Is Overboard (1987 and 2018) worth watching?
8/10 for the original. 6/10 for the remake.
The 1987 Overboard gets its 8 from Russell and Hawn and from that housework montage, and the premise is the reservation that keeps it from going higher. The remake is fine, and I had a pleasant enough time with it, but I can’t find a reason it needed to exist. Watch the original first. Skip the remake unless you’ve already seen the original and want to see what the gender flip looks like.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Overboard (1987), AFI Catalog
- Overboard (2018), The Numbers
- Overboard (1987), IMDb
- Overboard (2018), IMDb
