FILM REVIEW

The Change-Up

DIRECTED BY: David Dobkin
STARRING: Ryan Reynolds, Jason Bateman, Olivia Wilde, Leslie Mann
CERT: 16

The body-swap movie has been around the block a few times and seen better days than this.
Big, starring bright young thing Tom Hanks in 1988, was a sweet and funny film and probably the most memorable of these comedies. Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married, from 1986, was another fine example, as was the original Freaky Friday from 1976 – starring a 14-year-old Jodie Foster. More recently, even the Matthew Perry vehicle, 17 Again, had its moments. Certainly it was possible to watch it without feeling the need to take a chlorine bath afterwards and rinse with a power hose just to be sure.
Which is the urge you get after foolishly exposing your mind to The Change-Up, a trashy, vulgar piece of work that’s getting a lot more attention than it deserves. This is partly because it’s made by David Dobkin, who directed The Wedding Crashers and it’s written by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, the boys behind The Hangover. But if anything similarly entertaining happened when these minds met, it isn’t up on the screen.
It’s partly due, also, to its leading men, Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman, a couple of excellent comic actors who can charm something good out of almost anything. Just not this. Or at least, not enough good to save it from itself.
The lads play best friends Mitch and Dave. Mitch (Reynolds) is an unemployed actor who devotes his time to beautiful women and to the recreational use of relaxing herbs. Dave (Bateman) is married with three kids and spends his days as an attorney, in a permanent state of stress.
Well, as you do, they wish they could swap lives and see what it’s like on the other side of the fence. They just happen to express this wish while peeing in a fountain. This being a body-swap movie, the fountain is magical and next morning the friends wake up to realise they’ve… oh, go on, I’ll give you one guess.
With this kind of thing, the opportunities for fun are almost limitless but Dobkin and his writers seem intent only on topping every other “adult” comedy that’s reared its head recently, by coming up with the nastiest, most foul-mouthed, risibly juvenile concoction they can imagine.
Like the equally tasteless (but funnier) The Bridesmaids, this involves “hilarious” bowel movements. One of which is always one too many, but not for these guys, who grant equal opportunity to children and grown-ups alike.
On the upside, the result provides an excellent description of the film. It may also describe what hit the fan when Olivia Wilde and Leslie Mann paid a visit to their agents in the aftermath of this debacle. Wilde plays a seductive legal aide and Mann plays the unhappy family man’s wife – as she did in 17 Again, which is either coincidence or karma.
If it’s the latter, she must have been a very, very bad girl to deserve this.

I Don’t Know How She Does It

DIRECTED BY: Douglas McGrath
STARRING: Sarah Jessica Parker, Greg Kinnear, Pierce Brosnan
CERT: 12A

This would be a top contender for Dumbest Movie Title Of The Year, if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s named after a book – English author Alison Pearson’s debut novel. It’s still a dumb title, though we should just be glad they didn’t borrow the whole thing – I Don’t Know How She Does It: The Life Of Kate Reddy, Working Mother.
Kate Reddy (Parker) is a working mother, a charged-up super-achiever juggling job, motherhood and marriage to her husband Richard (Kinnear), an unemployed architect now working as man of the house.
Kate’s would-be perfect life is complicated by the usual old gender politics at the office and by her snooty stay-at-home-mom friends, who never tire of pointing out her domestic failings.
And it gets even more complicated when her boss (Kelsey Grammer – remember him?) hands her a big project, where she’ll work in close quarters with the handsome, charming big shot Jack Abelhammer (Brosnan). At the same time, husband and superdad Richard lands a big job of his own. Oh, the dilemma.
There’s a good movie to be made about the very real struggles of the working mother but this one isn’t it. I don’t know if Allison Pearson’s book successfully addressed that reality but if it did, something has been lost in transition to the screen. A few things, actually. Like heart, humanity or humour. Anything, really, resembling the real world.
The world where this Kate Reddy lives is some strange fantasyland, some parallel universe where people are crude caricatures who speak in perfect soundbites, nuggets of opinion that might easily have come from a college thesis on the battle of the sexes. They talk straight to the camera, too, a device that gets on the old nerves very rapidly indeed.
Like Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman before them, Greg Kinnear and Pierce Brosnan see their fine gifts wasted, like pearls before swine. Sarah Jessica Parker is not without talent, either, but she’s carrying around the ghost of Carrie Bradshaw and needs to do something about it. Like take a long holiday, then return to play a Satanist junkie who butchers little kittens for kicks.
I’d go see it.