“The Change-Up” (Two Stars)
U.S.: David Dobkin, 2011
The Change-Up, a big star body-swap comedy starring Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman, is a movie that begins with baby poop jokes and climaxes with its two “heroes” urinating together in a public fountain, before an audience. And you can almost hear the moviemakers yelling at each other “We’re Number One!” “We’re Number Two!”
 
That’s a crummy joke, I admit. (Number One, Number Two: Get it?) But most of the jokes in The Change-Up are even crummier, and those people are making millions. It’s only the show’s look of sexy professional Hollywood gloss, and the talent of Bateman and Reynolds playing each other inside each other, that keeps the movie afloat — despite the fact that, as advertised, The Change-Up unites the director (David Dobkin) of the highly popular (and highly lewd and scatology-packed) buddy-buddy wedding comedy Wedding Crashers, with the writers (Jon Lucas and Scotty Moore) of the unprecedentedly popular (and highly lewd and scatology-packed) buddy-buddy wedding comedy The Hangover.
 
It’s not reaaly a summit meeting. And there’s nothing in The Change-Up you wouldn’t expect, except perhaps that first glob of baby poop (Zing!) flying into daddy Bateman’s face. (And now you will expect it. But was it really worth a SPOILER ALERT?)
 
The movie offers Bateman and Reynolds as Mitch Planko and Dave Lockwood, two longtime buds whose lives have diverged yet merged in ways that only a Hollywood rom-com buddy-buddy writer could properly understand or explain. Dave is a well-paid corporate lawyer with a rosy future, heavy corporate responsibilities, poop-happy tots and a discontented wife (Leslie Mann as Janie). Mitch is a sometimes-paid playboy and occasional porno actor on semi-permanent vacation from responsibility, whose various main and subsidiary and one-shot squeezes, including the ferocious Tatiana (Mirceau Monroe), keep him jumping.
 
Neither guy is really happy; both think the other guy has it made. So…One night while pissing together in a park fountain (natch), they unwisely make a double wish, and the God of Indecent Exposure grants those wishes. They wind up inhabiting each other’s bodies. Soon Mitch-in-Dave is trying (not too hard) to master his role in a corporate merger showdown without offending everybody, and to keep his hands off Janie. And Dave-in-Mitch is partying hearty without feeling really comfortable, especially when Dave’s sexy assistant, Sabrina (Olivia Wilde) shows a yen for Mitch, not realizing it’s Dave inside. Also, the damned fountain has been carted off somewhere else, leaving the cancelled wish option temporarily kaput.
 
Wedding Crashers and The Hangover were both very funny comedies, with funny premises, good casts and good execution. The Change-Up, on the other hand, is just sort of funny, with a good cast and half-good execution. Its main plusses are the performances of its leads, the way Reynolds and Bateman push their own mannerisms at the start and then mimic each other’s tics after the switch. Bateman lays on his white collar neurotic inwardness and sneakiness, and Reynolds sells his jock stud affability. Then Bateman puts Reynolds’s jockishness and irreverence under his skin and Reynolds goes ditto with Bateman’s establishment man with a twitch routines. They’re good, but not good enough to put us inside the movie.
 
Body swap comedies may have a long history. In a way, they’re variations on those classic role-switching comedies: Shakespeare‘s “The Comedy of Errors” of Elizabethan England and Mark Twain’s “The Prince and the Pauper” from 19^th century America. In their movie fantasy form, they go all the way back to the Thorne Smith-derived, Hal Roach-directed 1940 comedy Turnabout, in which John Hubbard and Carole Landis inhabited each other, with risqué results. (I would have liked to see Cary Grant and Carole Lombard.) Later of course came Like Father, Like Son, Vice Versa and a few others.
 
The Change-Up is neither best nor worst in its dubious sub-genre. (By the way, isn’t a change-up an off-speed baseball pitch?) Thanks largely to Bateman and Reynolds, this movie is just sort of okay at times, as long as the poop isn’t flying. Otherwise it’s another four-letter buddy-buddy bromantic comedy with a switch, a pretender to the throne, haplessly yelling “We’re Number One!” “We’re Number Two!” before somebody flushes.
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