The Change-Up

A disappointing body-switch comedy, The Change-Up details the complications that ensue after an uptight lawyer (Jason Bateman’s Dave Lockwood) and an easygoing slacker (Ryan Reynolds’ Mitch Planko) trade bodies after peeing into a magical fountain. It’s exactly the sort of premise that one might’ve anticipated from a movie of this ilk and, for a while, The Change-Up delivers on the promise of its setup, with the movie’s watchable vibe heightened by a quick pace and the typically affable work of its two stars. (This is despite the fact that neither actor proves able to do a particularly memorable impression of the other.) Filmmaker David Dobkin, working from a script by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, effectively peppers the early part of the narrative with a handful of genuinely hilarious instances of comedy, while the movie’s able supporting cast, which includes Leslie Mann, Olivia Wilde, and Alan Arkin, provides a fair amount of color to the otherwise familiar proceedings. It’s clear, then, that The Change-Up doesn’t begin to fizzle out until around the one-hour mark, after which point Dobkin places a progressively tedious emphasis on the central characters’ attempts at adjusting to their new lives – with the less-than-enthralling atmosphere compounded by a third act dominated by eye-rollingly sentimental shenanigans. The almost absurdly overlong running time ultimately compounds The Change-Up‘s various problems, and it’s finally impossible to regard the movie as anything more than a missed opportunity of enormous proportions.

** out of ****