The 1987 romantic-comedy classic Overboard starring Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell has aged… oddly. It’s a movie where a man essentially kidnaps a woman with a head injury and uses her as a servant for himself and his children. It’s cute though. Problematically cute.
The 2018 remake attempts to cushion some of the original’s problematic nature by gender-swapping it. In this film, Anna Faris plays a single mother down on her luck, working multiple jobs to keep her house and take care of her children, when she meets a rich, selfish playboy, played by Eugenio Derbez, while working on his yacht. When he falls overboard (get it, like the title you see) she picks him up from the hospital and convinces him he’s her husband and making him work to pay off the money he owes her.
So, rather than a man kidnapping a woman and subjecting her to forced labor, it’s a white woman doing it to a Mexican man. I don’t know that this quite fixes the problematic nature as the film intended, but they do attempt to ensure it’s clear the idea to do this came from Faris’s character’s best friend played by Eva Longoria, who is also of Mexican descent, because that helps, I guess? This all seems very murky. But hopefully, like it’s predecessor, it’s murkily cute.
