#The change up movie#

But Dave (Bateman) thinks Mitch’s stress-free life without obligation or consequence is the real dream come true. Mitch (Reynolds) thinks Dave has it all: a beautiful, loving family and a high-paying job at a prestigious law firm. One drunken night, two friends admit that they wish they had the other’s life. Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman star in the outrageous comedy from the director of Wedding Crashers and the writers of The Hangover.

#The change up movie#

It’s no surprise that this movie requires all of its female actresses to strip to their skivvies, or bare their breasts, or in the case of Mircea Monroe, as the aforementioned pregnant lady, completely humiliate themselves.īut Reynolds, he of the hulking, himbo frame, isn’t even asked to remove his shirt, and Bateman remains completely buttoned-up, even when he’s in bed in his pajamas, and even when the Dave character is incarnated by the carefree Mitch.Title #4, Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21. But there’s nothing priggish about wanting to see sexual conventions exploded and reinvented, and movies like “The Change-Up” do the exact opposite. The popular culture, which has turned many of these movies into giant hits, makes it hard to argue against the raunchy comedy: If you don’t like these kinds of movies, you must be some kind of prig. When Mitch and Dave pee into the fountain, do we really have to watch their stream of urine arc into the fountain? Yes, we do! Here the crudeness and scatology is built into the film’s DNA, and it defines every frame. Yet we’re a long way from the “American Pie” / “There’s Something About Mary” days of apple pie and hair gel, where the shock gags functioned as exclamatory set pieces that didn’t overwhelm the story. They’re much more concerned with stringing together “shock scenes,” the lingua franca of the raunchy comedy. The story cycles through the usual riffs – Is it cheating if you’re not in your own body? – and Reynolds is good enough to almost make you care about whether Dave will give in to temptation.Įxcept you don’t care, because the renewal of Dave’s fledgling marriage to Jamie (Leslie Mann) is prescribed into the rules of the genre.

The Dave-incarnated Mitch struggles to begin a romance with Sabrina, a lawyer in Dave’s firm who turns out to have had a crush on Dave but resisted acting on it because he’s married. In the less showy part, Reynolds tries to deliver a small measure of humanity.

Go figure, the funniest scene in the movie is arguably the least raunchy - when the new Dave convinces his daughter Cara, played by Sydney Rouviere, to settle her disagreements at school with violence. As the Mitch-incarnated version of Dave, he’s giddily reborn as a foul-mouthed, fast-talking shark. To that end, Bateman is the saving grace of “The Change-Up.” As Dave, he’s predictably Bateman-y, sweet but a tad persnickety. The body-swap comedy has proven enduring mostly because it gives actors the chance to perform two roles: playing up their type and against it.

Lightning strikes, literally, and they wake up the next morning in the wrong bodies. After drinking too much one night, the men find themselves simultaneously urinating into a fountain, while also wishing that they could have the other’s life.

Dave Lockwood (Jason Bateman) is a lawyer, married with three kids, who pines for the freedom enjoyed by his best friend, Mitch Planko (Ryan Reynolds). That story is one Hollywood has been replaying for decades, the body-swap comedy, in movies vastly more likable than this one. The director, David Dobkin (“Wedding Crashers”), and the writers, Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (“The Hangover”), are so desperate to shock you that they barely seem to realize they’re supposed to be telling some kind of story. The problem isn’t that nothing is sacred here – nothing should be sacred in a raunchy comedy. Oh, and if the baby poop wasn’t enough, the female lead also loudly and graphically relieves herself after eating too much spicy Thai food. We witness one of the male characters sandwiched between two porn stars on the set of an adult movie, and a naked pregnant woman begging for sex. What is there left to say? It begins with a gag involving an infant projectile-pooping into his father’s face – and that’s actually one of the more elegant bits in the movie. “The Change-Up,” is a kind of a greatest-hits collection of middle-age manchild comedy.