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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

The Change-Up

THE CHANGE-UP (David Dobkin). 112 minutes. Opens Friday (August 5). See listing. Rating: NN


Here’s the thing about body-swapping comedies: they only really work when the stars are equally matched. Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan in Freaky Friday? Yes. Judge Reinhold and Fred Savage in Vice Versa? Not so much.

Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman run into that problem in The Change-Up because, when you get right down to it, Reynolds is a movie star and Bateman is not. Oh, he’s a valuable ensemble player and a great straight man, but he doesn’t hold the screen the way Reynolds does – even when he’s supposed to be inhabited by Reynolds’s soul.

This movie is Reynolds’s from beginning to end, allowing him to send up his frat-boy image by going way over the top at the outset and then channel Bateman’s fussy-prissy persona so well that the illusion never falters. (Amazing that this rather than that dopey superhero venture should be the movie that reaffirms Reynolds’s star quality.) His performance completely unbalances the movie, mainly because director David Dobkin doesn’t have the slightest idea how to strike an equilibrium between the two storylines.

Yeah, so, about the story. Bateman plays Dave, an overachieving lawyer who’s lost sight of his real goals Reynolds is his best pal, Mitch, a slacker coasting on his looks and id. They switch bodies (never mind how, it’s really stupid) and each learns valuable lessons about appreciating himself from the outside in. There are no real characters here, just exaggerated types. This works in Reynolds’s favour because he’s so very good at playing an overgrown kid, and not so much in Bateman’s, because the gimmick requires him to go just as big, and he simply looks uncomfortable.

The women don’t have it much easier. Leslie Mann alternates between shrill and weepy as Dave’s neglected wife Olivia Wilde is the sexy associate with whom Dave considers a fling while driving Mitch’s body.

Given that Dobkin is the guy who makes ultimately moralistic family-first comedies like Wedding Crashers and Fred Claus, everything you expect to happen happens. Whatever energy the movie has comes from Reynolds’s live-wire performance.

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