Family Switch

Directed by McG, Family Switch details the chaos and wackiness that ensues after the Walker family, which includes Ed Helms’ Bill and Jennifer Garner’s Jess, switch bodies with one another. It’s a seemingly foolproof setup that’s employed to increasingly (and distressingly) underwhelming effect by McG, as the filmmaker, armed with a screenplay by Adam Sztykiel and Victoria Strouse, delivers an often astonishingly bland endeavor that’s been suffused with a progressively intolerable slick and generic feel – with the commonplace atmosphere perpetuated by an emphasis on tiresome clichés and eye-rollingly stale jokes. And while the picture admittedly does boast a very small handful of agreeable interludes and comedic touches, including, in terms of the latter, a funny bit wherein Garner’s character attempts (and fails) to hold in a fart during an important meeting, Family Switch‘s lackluster execution slowly-but-surely renders its positive attributes moot and, in a far more disastrous development, ensures that the picture’s second half drags to a frustratingly palpable extent – which, when coupled with an upbeat yet anticlimactic finale, cements the film’s place as a body-switching comedy that fares much, much worse than most other similarly-themed endeavors.

*1/2 out of ****