Title: The Change-Up

Opens: August 5, 2011

If by now you do not see the error of thinking that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, David Dobkin will supply a lesson. With “Change-Up,” whose writers Joe Lucas and Scott Moor offer up quite a number of one-line zingers to match no small amount of visual and vocal vulgarity, two best friends in their thirties learn that the grass can indeed be greener elsewhere, but only temporarily. Trading places may be an awesome novelty at first, but like the lottery winner who starts on cloud 9 but then becomes so unnerved by his change of status that he may regret even buying a ticket, Mitch Lockwood (Ryan Reynolds) and David Lockward (Jason Bateman) discover that the hoariest feel-good quote in the books, “Be Yourself,” applies to them as well.

They learn this by switching personalities while keeping their bodies intact. The metamorphosis occurs without the bold drama that once saw Gregor Samsa turn into an insect, but by a process that, in line with our currently debased culture, locates them peeing into the water surrounding a statue and saying “I wish I had your life.” In just a little longer than the time it takes Billy Batson to morph into Captain Marvel, but more quickly than Clark Kent could change into Superman, the lights of the city go out. When illumination returns, presto: they look the same but David now has Mitch’s personality and Mitch becomes Dave, character-wise.

There’s little wonder why Dave wants to be like Mitch. Though making gobs of money as a corporate lawyer and on the verge of partnership, Dave has hours that do not allow him to spend much time with his wife, Jamie (Leslie Mann) and three small girls as he would wish. When he changes a diaper, a wad of poop smashes into the left side of his face, followed up in good measure by another tawny bomb. A child a year old or so has developed a habit of banging his head repeatedly on the walls of the playpen. Mitch, a swinging bachelor who has no more problem hitting the sheets with the babes than “Crazy, Stupid, Love”‘s Ryan Gosling, finds his life lonely; nor can the well-endowed bimbo nymphomaniac Tatiana (Mircea Monroe) give him the peace of mind that Mitch believes a perk of belonging to real families.

Some of what passes for visual gags is worthy of a Judd Apatow but often range from unfunny to embarrassingly lame. Dave, now thinking like Mitch while anticipating sex “for the first time” with Jamie, becomes turned off when she takes a dump (too much Thai food) with the door open and sound effects trenchant. Mitch, thinking like Dave, wonders what he’s doing making porn movies, particularly when the seedy director instructs him where to put his thumb—three times at a that. Olivia William, suddenly becoming as ubiquitous as Jennifer Aniston as Hollywood’s new sex queen, retains both the sexiest and the most dignified role as lawyer Sabrina McArdle, working too hard with her need for real fun awakened on a hot date with Mitch, but she awakens similarly libidinous feelings from Mitch only for a while. (Remember “Mitch” is Dave, not so sure that being a swingle can cut the mustard like being rooted in a family.)

Ultimately the movie appears to say that you are not what you eat: instead, you are what you are. Obviously Dave, who studied hard and worked four jobs to get through law school, is the sort of person who would do just that. Mitch, whose own dad (Alan Arkin), considers him a lazy dude who cannot complete what he begins, is the sort who should continue being the dude who never completes what he begins. Neither party changes for long. Both long to return to their selves. Yet the picture fails to evoke the hilarity of Mark Waters’s 2003 movie “Freaky Friday,” which found a teen and her mother facing an abyss of a generation gap, and who learn to understand each other when they eat fortune cookies and change roles. Nor is “The Change-Up” as appealing as Rod Daniels’s 1987 pic “Like Father Like Son,” wherein a special potion changes the roles of an uptight dad and his layabout son.

Those films did not rely heavily on gross-out humor. Their directors did not believean audience would walk out saying “boring” if they did not did not hear the “F” word far more than the single instance that might save a picture’s PG-13 rating. I don’t believe mature adults want to watch film studios rely such much on off-the-wall coarse, a sub-genre that was fine when it was more or less introduced by the Farrelly brothers’ “There’s Something About Mary,” a neat reversal of fifties Hollywood movies burdened with a code that would not put a man and woman in bed together unless they each had a foot on the floor. There’s no way we can, or should, go back to such a repressive time, but the surge of uncouth, in-your-face shots such as one finding three tattoo artists peering up close and personal at a woman being tattooed on her upper thigh, and even worse, the sight of a pretty woman taking a crap with the door open (which only LBJ could get away with), could lead to a Thermidorean reaction by a public even more bored than disgusted by earthy dialogue and smutty visuals.

Rated R. 105 minutes. (c) 2011 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online

Overall – B-