Full Review: The Change-Up

Grade: B

Dave is a hardworking lawyer who is married with a daughter and two new born twins. Things have been rough lately as Dave has been working hard on a case at work and his home life has been affected by this. Mitch is an actor who doesn't seem to get much work and spends most of his days doing, pretty much, whatever he wants. The two have been best friends their whole lives and after a night of drinking, the two stumble upon a fountain they use to urinate in. Somehow, by doing so, the two switch bodies and the fountain has gone missing. Now, the two must do their best to respect each other’s lives until the fountain is found and they can switch back. The two, of course, learn valuable lessons along the way.

The Change-Up follows a tried and true formula of movies like Freaky Friday and its many remakes. The main difference being that this body switching movie is much raunchier and has tons of adult language. Rather than being the typical Mother/Daughter or Father/Son switch, this is more of an Odd Couple switch. Dave is clean, organized, wears a suit every day, has a respectable job, has kids and is generally responsible. Mitch is single, lazy, does what he wants (which usually includes lots of drinking and weed) and has lots of random sex with strange women. So to watch these two switch bodies is really funny and entertaining. Especially watching as Mitch tries to be Dave and just fail miserably. I easily laughed through 85-90% of this movie, it is better than I thought it would be. However, I do have to say that there are several moments in the trailer that were hilarious and they are either played down or missing all together from the movie. While I understand that this happens frequently, some of these moments were genius and I don’t get why they would be cut out. Also, one of my few complaints about this movie is that I am not a big fan of poop/gross humor and while there are only a small handful of these moments, some of them took me out of the movie for a moment.

Jason Bateman (Horrible Bosses, Paul) plays the role of Dave. He does a great job in this movie and he is absolutely hilarious, as he usually is. Bateman is one of the more consistently funny actors out there and he does not disappoint in this. Ryan Reynolds (Green Lantern, Buried) plays the role of Mitch. He was great and completely outrageous in this. His character has the vast majority of the language and raunchiness in this movie and Reynolds does this extremely well. Bateman and Reynolds play each other extremely well, but some of that is because the two have similar comedy styles. The movie also features Leslie Mann, Olivia Wilde, Alan Arkin and more.

If you are looking for a fun comedy that is loaded with adult humor and all that comes with that, then the Change-Up is the movie for you. It is a great comedy but the easily offended should pass on this one. It tries to instill a message and succeeds somewhat but it’s kind of lost amidst everything else that is happening in the movie.

Great quote: “Take my hands off of you!”