Secondhand Reviews: "The Change-Up"

Rated R for strong language, alcohol and drug use, sexual situations and computer-generated nudity.

* * * * * * * * * *

Why do performers who have shown they have real talent, and have at least occasionally demonstrated the ability to pick and choose scripts well enough that they wind up in movies that are actually worthy of their talents... why do they still, most of the time, end up in turkeys like "The change-Up?" This is, after all, a movie featuring the stars of "Juno" and "Definitely, Maybe" (the latter still the romantic comedy against which all other contemporary ones should be judged). Did they not take a single look at the script and see what a horrid piece of crud it was? Or did they just have faith that since the early portions were so promising that the rest of the movie must be the same and therefore didn't bother to read the remainder? I'd like to hope that was it.

After a long time away, those "classic" body-switch movies from the 80's seem to be making a big comeback, though so far even the least of the 80's versions are better than this one. In this, Dave (Jason Bateman) is a married father of three, two of them infants, and while he genuinely loves his wife (Leslie Mann) and kids he's overwhelmed by the duties of fatherhood and envies the carefree bachelor life of his friend Mitch (Ryan Reynolds). One night while the two of them are peeing into a (deserted) public fountain after a night of drinking, they wish out loud that they each had each other's lives (Mitch just doing it "to be nice"). Turns out it was a magic fountain (don't you wish they would put labels on those things?), and they're granted their wishes. Of course, it turns out that they don't get what they thought they would.

I came to this film with extremely low expectations (one of the reasons I waited to see it second run), but was very pleasantly surprised in the earliest scenes. Bateman does a great job portraying a thoughtful, loving father who's on the verge of going crazy, and Reynolds, who tends toward being overly smug and self-involved in most of his roles, is clearly in on the joke as the film mocks the shallowness of his playboy character, and he finds just the right tone for it. THEN... oh, then... we have to get the body switch, as each is mystically transferred into the body of the other. From that point on all of the subtlety, all of the actual humor, all of the quality acting in those early scenes fly right out the window and it becomes very easy to forget they ever existed. From that point on this movie is every unfunny, cliched, downright painful thing I had feared it was going to be.

Dave and Mitch are supposed to be intelligent characters... Dave, in particular, could never have reached his high position at his company if he'd been an idiot. And yet once our heroes determine that they're going to have to pretend to be each other until they can find a way to switch back, it's as if every single thing they've learned about each other since they met back in childhood totally leaves their minds. They KNOW full well that their typical actions and lifestyles are polar opposites and they'll have to pretend to be very different to carry off their masquerade, then Mitch proceeds to act exactly like Mitch and say & do things Dave never would, and vice versa. Apparently, during the body switch, both of their brains went missing.

Then these two guys, who have been dedicated friends their whole lives, and who would do anything to help out the other, also seem to completely forget that deep friendship and become determined to take advantage of the new situation not matter how it hurts their so-called friend (Mitch laughing as he tells Dave he's going to HAVE TO have sex with his wife or she'll know something is weird), and Dave being uncharacteristically eager to break the vows he's lived by his whole life (NEVER cheating on his wife) when the opportunity comes up for a relationship with the co-worker he's had his eye on but never approached (Olivia Wilde).And of course there has to be the typical immature, adolescent approach to the humor in a movie that's supposed to be about mature, adult males in their thirties (and naturally it has to include the requisite homophobic gay-panic jokes). And naturally, women have to be portrayed as the usual blank-slate characters who are really only present to serve as the source of slapstick gags by the guys. (Complete with the usual bodily function jokes that make you think you're watching a film made by 12-year-olds, the main one at the expense of Leslie Mann.)

This is the sort of movie where I almost have to wish that it had been a total loser right from the first scene onward. Then, it wouldn't have been as painful to watch what might have been that rare intelligent guy-oriented comedy descend into the land of cliche the way it does. Think about it: how many movies have we seen in recent years in which an actual realistic friendship between two guys... especially two guys as different as these... is depicted by good actors who clearly are enjoying what they're doing, with a decent script and the promise of a look at how two men of such polar opposite lifestyles managed to FORM that friendship and keep it going over the years, all the while never losing site of being funny? I can't offhand think of ANY movie like that of recent vintage, and it's one that we could really have used. Instead, we get "The Change-Up"... which, after the dozens of other movies just like it, is definitely one more that we DON'T need. The classic poem was right: "Of all the words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: it might have been."