advertisement

Crassness trumps cleverness in 'Change-Up'

"The Change-Up" wastes no time in establishing just how low it will go to make us laugh.

Or wish we hadn't just purchased that candy bar.

In the middle of the night, a sleepy Dave (Jason Bateman) changes the diaper on one of his twin babies when a projectile bowel movement hits him square in the face.

Twice.

It's a shame that "The Change-Up" has so little respect for audiences and its own story that it traffics in hit-and-miss comic vulgarity, then tries to redeem itself with sentimental scenes so forced they make our ears bleed.

"The Change-Up' could have been so much more than director David "Wedding Crashers" Dobkin thinks it is.

Dave and Mitch (erstwhile Green Lantern, Ryan Reynolds) have been best friends since third grade. (Dave apparently forgets this and has to be reminded.)

Dope-smoking single wild man Mitch envies boring Dave's nailed-down world as a father, husband and big-shot attorney at a large law firm. Dave envies Mitch's freedom and never-ending supply of sexual partners.

One night while plastered, the two relieve themselves in a public wading pool lorded over by a mysterious, frowning statue.

"I wish I had your life!" Mitch and Dave shout simultaneously.

<I>Poof!

</I>Next morning, Dave wakes up in Mitch's body; Mitch wakes up in Dave's. High jinks and confusion ensue.

"Change-Up" joins a tattered parade of body-switch comedies that enjoyed a brief period of popularity in the 1980s with "18 Again," "Vice-Versa," "All of Me," "Dream a Little Dream" and "Like Father, Like Son."

Of course, "Freaky Friday" came out a decade earlier and spawned a remake.

Technically, "Change-Up" is a body-switch comedy, but I regard it more as a nod to Billy Crystal's "City Slickers" in which a family man goes on a horseback quest to find the No. 1 most important thing in his life.

This is the real plot to "Change-Up," with a supernatural twist added.

After living in each other's shoes, Mitch and Dave come to realize the No. 1 most important things in their lives.

In smarter hands, or at least nonpandering hands, this could have been a much more shrewd, emotionally committed, grass-is-greener parable.

Screenwriters Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, who gave us "The Hangover," throw the humanistic part of their story under a bus loaded with profanity, self-abuse jokes, intestinal distress gags, sexual fetishes with pregnant women and bizarre setups that extract laughs by showing babies nearly killing themselves with electro-shocks and meat cleavers.

Don't get me wrong, "The Change-Up" tosses so many gross-out jokes up on the screen that some actually work, like the crass comedic contents of "The Hangover."

Most of the time, the running gags simply run out of humor, for example, the endless discussions of the differences between Mitch's and Dave's genitalia.

Once again, the comically underutilized Leslie Mann gets stuck playing the whiny wife, although she makes this one more sexually assured by doffing more clothes than she ever could in a PG-13 rated comedy.

Not so with Olivia Wilde, playing Sabrina, Dave's eye-arresting legal assistant. Even though the emerging sex symbol displays more skin here than she does in the current "Cowboys & Aliens," the wily Wilde avoids even the half-Monty.

Here's a real switch. The TV commercials for the R-rated "Change-Up" don't ruin any of the jokes or plot points.

They can't possibly be used in a public broadcast.

&lt;b&gt;“The Change-Up”&lt;/b&gt;

★ ★

Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Jason Bateman, Olivia Wilde, Leslie Mann, Alan Arkin

Directed by: David Dobkin

Other: A Universal Pictures release. Rated R for drug use, language, nudity, sexual situations. 115 minutes