C || The Change-Up || Review

Review by Jason Venter
August 06, 2011
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While peeing into a fountain in the park after a night of too much drinking, long-time best friends Dave Lockwood (Jason Bateman) and Mitch Planko (Ryan Reynolds) simultaneously say “I wish I had your life.” The lights around the block suddenly flicker out for a moment before power is restored. The two men assume that they were caught in a rolling blackout and head home for the evening. The next morning, they wake to find that the wish has come true. Dave is Mitch and Mitch is Dave. They have gone through “The Change-up.”

The switch comes at an inconvenient moment for each of them. Dave is about to play a small role in the merger that has the chance to earn him a place as partner in the prestigious but floundering law firm where he has worked for 15 years. Meanwhile, his home life is suffering as a result of his commitment to his job and his tenuous grasp on the state of his interactions with his wife Jamie (Leslie Mann).

As for Mitch, he doesn’t have a lot of important things going on in his life—which is how he would like to keep things—but he does have a date with the spectacularly kinky Tatiana (Mircea Monroe) and he also has a role in a new film that he’s pretty excited about.

Neither Dave nor Mitch wants the other to mess things up, because neither man seems to realize how much their respective lives lack. Though they are quick to understand how they got into their predicament (which is refreshing for this sort of tale), they can’t just go urinate in the fountain to take back their wish. They try that straight away and find that the fountain has been moved to places unknown. They have no choice but to play through the farce while they wait for a chance to set things right.

You can probably guess about where the movie will end up, just based on the above description. Hollywood has certain conventions that must be followed, after all, and “The Change-up” isn’t a movie that tries to challenge those conventions. Instead, it gets by on the charisma of its principle characters and the willingness of the actors to commit to some fairly outlandish scenes. Most previous movies to explore such scenarios have been very Disney-fied, so here you get to see what happens when the writers responsible for “The Hangover” try their hand at the classic formula.

As you can imagine, “The Change-up” is not a movie that most will care to see with their children. There’s a lot of nudity, a lot of sexual discussion, drug use and plenty of profanity. Thankfully, raunchy content isn’t the only thing the film has going for it. Flawed though they are, the main characters are mostly credible and it’s interesting to watch them cope with one another’s problems as they come to term with problems of their own. Some of the most touching and hilarious moments are G-rated, too, like when womanizing Mitch—in Dave’s body—tries to feed his kids their formula in the middle of the night, or when he councils Dave’s daughter on dealing with a ballerina bully.

“The Change-up” is often predictable and occasionally you may have trouble accepting what the characters do even if you’re willing to give the silly premise a pass, but a lot of what you’ll see is funny no matter how the characters got where they are. Certainly you won’t leave the theater with profound insight into the human condition, but sometimes a grin is just as good.

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