I won’t make this review a long one. If I wrote ten paragraphs I would be putting more thought into it than America has (the movie came and went last weekend at the box office) so I’ll just get to the bullet points of this body swap flick.
What Works: MVP Jason Bateman who almost single-handedly elevates this movie from C grade to B grade. That won’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who’s watched him make a winning straight man in wild ensembles from Arrested Development to Horrible Bosses. But The Change-Up offers something different as he gets to become the wild guy (he swaps bodies with Ryan Reynolds’s asshole bachelor), and it looks good on him. Whether he’s doing the world’s worst job at feeding his kids or spectacularly blowing a meeting, Bateman livens up a movie that borrows a reliable formula.
Also, the movie has several broad physical comedy gags that come off as refreshing–I can’t believe I actually typed that–in the age of Judd Apatow where characters sit around endlessly talking about vulgar things but doing very few of them. There’s a scene where Bateman has to feed his two twins that’s so stupid I’m embarrassed at how much I laughed at it, and that’s a good thing. After smirking a handful of times but never really laughing at Knocked Up, Get Him to the Greek, and Super Bad, that’s a great thing.
What Doesn’t Work: Reynolds is given the harder role and even though he’s not terrible in it, it won’t do anything to contradict his reputation for being bland. Also Leslie Bibb turns in yet another whining, brittle wife role and I’m beginning to wonder if she can do anything else.
What I Would Have Done Differently: The movie itself didn’t break any new ground, and I didn’t expect it to. I’m not sure there could be a great way to do a body swap movie at this point, but I would have started by making Ryan Reynolds’s Mitch a quasi-human being. In the beginning minutes, he’s so obnoxious he’s not even a real person.