The Change-Up: A Hilarious Body Swap Comedy
It’s funny and sometimes brutally sharp, although even a child knows how it will end.
A driven career man (Bateman) and a slacker womanizer (Reynolds) have been friends since high school. Both are unhappy: the first is fed up with his kids constantly banging their heads against the wall, the second is bored to death with loneliness, despite the perks of occasionally visiting pregnant nymphomaniacs. After getting properly drunk at a bar, they confess their mutual envy, simultaneously pee in a fountain, and wake up the next morning in each other’s bodies.
Masters of Male Humor
Screenwriters Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, who previously wrote “The Hangover” (2009), really know how to properly laugh at marriage, children, and men in general as a biological species. This skill allows them to tackle even a thankless and age-old plot, where the slightest wrong move guarantees a complete “Freaky Friday” (2003) outcome. Instead of rushing to invent some new body-swapping mechanic, the authors reasonably push the unnecessary magic into the background and calmly get down to their signature scenes from the series “a wild man tries to feed infants” or “a faithful married man shares a couch with Olivia Wilde.” It’s a shame there was no room for Mike Tyson.