The Change-Up

Jason Bateman knows that no matter how much Ryan Reynolds pleas he's not getting Leslie Mann's teddy bears.

(2011) Comedy Fantasy (Universal) Ryan Reynolds, Jason Bateman, Leslie Mann, Olivia Wilde, Alan Arkin, Mircea Monroe, Gregory Itzin, Ned Schmidtke, Lo Ming, Sydney Rouviere, Andrea Moore, Craig Bierko, Taafe O’Connell, Ed Ackerman. Directed by David Dobkin

It is said that the grass is always greener on the other side and as with most clichés, there is a good deal of truth to it. It is human nature to want that which we don’t have. However, most times when we finally get to the other side we come to the understanding that the greener hue was just a trick of the light.

Dave (Bateman) is a family man with three children, two of them infants. He’s married to Jamie (Mann) who is beautiful and loving. He’s also a hard-working corporate lawyer who’s about to shepherd a merger that will virtually guarantee him the partnership he’s been working towards for a decade. However, Dave is working so hard juggling family and firm that his family focus has begun to suffer and Jamie is beginning to question how present he is in the relationship as husband and father (he has the breadwinner thing down cold).

Mitch (Reynolds) is Dave’s best friend, a ladies’ man and perpetually unemployed actor who spends most of his day getting stoned, playing video games and having every kind of sex with a wide variety of beautiful women. The two hang out at a local bar one night, watching a baseball game and talking about their lives. As the shots flow and the evening wears on, each professes admiration for the lifestyle of the other. As they stumble from the bar well past last call, nature calls and the two find a fountain in a public park nearby. As they urinate into the fountain, they both manage to say simultaneously “I wish I had your life.” The lights go out dramatically and the two go home to sleep it off.

Except when they wake up they are in each others’ bodies. Mitch suddenly has to cope with changing babies, attending meetings, seeing things through and the kind of intimacy in a relationship that goes beyond sex. Dave has to cope with kinky sex, loneliness and learning how to relax. However without meaning to, each one is screwing up the other’s lives. They must become the men that the other one is in order to get back to their own lives.

This may be a first for body switch movies – transference via urination. Certainly I for one am going to be much more selective into which troughs I pee into and with whom from here on out. However, pee isn’t the only bodily fluid you’ll be encountering here; in the first five minutes Dave gets a face full (and mouthful) of baby poop. That kind of sets the tone.

At least it does for the first half of the movie. From going Judd Apatow-raunchy in the first half, the second half is all Frank Capra-sentimental as the men learn the value of appreciating what they have. That almost sounds like a studio shying away from a complete raunchfest which is kind of bizarre because in addition to the scatological you’ll find sex with an EXTREMELY pregnant woman as well as with a decidedly mature woman, not to mention masturbation and extra scrotums. It’s a virtual smorgasbord of carnal delight.

Bateman is scaling comedy heights that will soon have him rubbing elbows with Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler and Jim Carrey. Here he shows off that he can be much more versatile in his range, playing both the irresponsible horndog as well as the conservative family man. Reynolds seems to be more involved doing action movies lately but it’s easy to forget he’s done some pretty solid comedic roles as well (Definitely Maybe, Waiting…) and is quite good at them. Bateman and Reynolds have some good chemistry together and in fact the whole ensemble fit together nicely as a whole.

Mann has some genuinely affecting moments as Dave’s long-suffering wife who isn’t quite sure if she and her children have the place in Dave’s heart that they used to. The always reliable Alan Arkin has a few scenes as Mitch’s estranged dad and Olivia Wilde looks gorgeous as a law clerk with a thing for Dave…err, Mitch…err, Dave. It’s hard to get straight.

Body switching movies are as old as the hills and have been done in as many different ways as you can think of. This one purported to be a raunchy sexy version of the genre but only really sticks to it for the first half of the movie before being roped into the schmaltz that Hollywood seems to demand of its comedies. Not every great comedy has to come with a heart-warming ending, after all.

I wish The Change-Up had the courage of its convictions and had stuck to the raunchiness throughout. That seemed to be where the movie was in its comfort zone. I had hoped with the leads that the movie had it could have ended up a lot better of a movie. It’s still not that bad but it is a bit disappointing given my expectations for it.

REASONS TO GO: Reynolds and Bateman are extremely appealing leads.

REASONS TO STAY: Movie veers wildly from crude to cuddly. Humor is hit or miss, usually the latter. Been there done that factor is high.

FAMILY VALUES: There is quite a bit more nudity here than is usual for most Hollywood films of the 21st century; also there’s a good deal of salty language, drug use and innuendo.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The bar scenes were filmed at an Atlanta watering hole called Joe’s on Juniper.

HOME OR THEATER: This is definitely one you can save for your Netflix queue.

FINAL RATING: 6/10

TOMORROW: Another Earth

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Limitless

Abbie Cornish monitors Bradley Cooper's hand positioning very carefully.

(2011) Science Fiction (Rogue/Relativity) Bradley Cooper, Abbie Cornish, Robert De Niro, Anna Friel, Tomas Arana, Andrew Howard, Johnny Whitworth, Robert John Burke, Darren Goldstein, Ned Eisenberg, T.V. Carpio, Richard Bekins. Directed by Neil Burger

We all are victims of our own limitations. We forget things, often almost as soon as we learn them. Still, that knowledge is there, locked in the recesses of our own minds, waiting for us to access it and use it. What do you think would happen if we did?

Eddie Morra (Cooper) is a writer. Excuse me, a wannabe writer. He’s been given a book contract for which the deadline is fast approaching and he hasn’t written one word. He lives in the ugliest, most slovenly bachelor pad in New York. And his girlfriend Lindy (Cornish) has just given him the boot.

It’s been a bad day for Eddie. However, somewhat serendipitously he runs into his ex brother-in-law Vernon (Whitworth) on the street. Eddie was married to Vernon’s sister Melissa (Friel) right out of college and though the marriage didn’t last, Vernon remains something of a douchebag. He was a drug dealer when Eddie knew him but he’s graduated to a much different kind of drug.

It’s called NZT and it allows you to access 100% of your brain capacity at once, instead of the 20% we normally use. Eddie is skeptical but when he takes one, he suddenly remembers things half-glimpsed and is able to fend off a nagging landlord’s wife (Carpio) and not only help her write her dissertation, but ends up bedding her as well.

He also winds up cleaning his apartment, then sits down and bangs out 40 pages of the book he has been unable to write due to an advanced case of writer’s block or, more likely, a terminal case of nothing in particular to say.

However the pill wears off and he goes to Vernon’s apartment to get one and instead winds up with a stash. Now he finds himself learning new languages, and finishing his book in four days. He has become irresistible to women and sleeps with a bevy of super-attractive Manhattan partiers.

He also has become bored. He wants to make money faster, so he learns the art of day trading and quickly turns a paltry stake into millions in just ten days. This gets him noticed by Carl Van Lune (De Niro), a ruthless energy tycoon who is in the midst of brokering the biggest merger in American history with the company owned by Hank Atwood (Bekins), whose meteoric rise to the top has puzzled a lot of pundits.

Even as Lindy comes back to Eddie, there are cracks appearing in the façade of Eddie’s perfect existence. A Russian mobster (Howard) who accidentally took one of Eddie’s pills has decided he needs Eddie’s stash. Worse yet, the pill is showing signs of having major side effects which unchecked can be deadly. Is Eddie smart enough to think is way out of this one?

In a very real way this is the legitimate heir to Charly (which was, like this, based on a work of literature, in that case Daniel Keyes’ “Flowers for Algernon” and here Alan Glynn’s “The Dark Fields”). Unlike the other which was more of a drama this is more of an action film slash thriller. The ramifications of a drug like this on humanity are only hinted at in the broadest terms and the story often leaves that conversation behind for the murky and sometimes meandering plotlines with the Russian mobster and the Machiavellian industrialist.

That’s too bad, because this could have been so much more compelling. Cooper is a charismatic lead, coming into his own a couple of years after his breakthrough role in The Hangover. He is easygoing and charming, for the most part but the role deceptively calls for more. Cooper makes both the slacker Eddie of the first reel and the brilliant Eddie of the rest of the film mesh together, clearly the same man at heart but wildly different in personalities. This is Cooper’s first real leading role; given the success of the movie so far, I can’t imagine there won’t be more in his very near future.

De Niro is, well, De Niro. Of late he seems to be coasting more and more in parts that are truly beneath him. While Van Lune has the potential of being worthy of a De Niro performance, at the end of the day he’s just another corporate villain, offering no real insight into what drives him or people like him and reminding me – not in a good way – of De Niro’s role as the Senator in Machete and when did you think that De Niro wouldn’t be the strongest acting performance of all the cast in a movie?

Burger uses a lot of interesting tunnel vision-like effects that can be dizzying. The first time he does it, the effect looks cool. By the fourth or fifth time it kind of loses its magic. There are an array of digital effects that represent Eddie’s growing intellect that are well played in the movie however.

The premise is clever; it’s a bit of a disappointment that they didn’t do more with it. Still, as I write this I realize I’m coming off as harsher on the movie than it really deserves and quite frankly, I enjoyed it. The movie hums along at a brisk pace and the story is compelling enough that given the fine work by Cooper in the lead role you have enough for a recommendation from me. However, I kinda wish these pills really existed. Maybe I could take some and start writing great screenplays right?

REASONS TO GO: Cooper is an engaging lead. The cinematography is stylish and the movie is surprisingly clever.

REASONS TO STAY: Too many “Look ma I’m directing” shots.

FAMILY VALUES: There is extensive drug usage (it is a film about a miracle drug after all), violence, some disturbing images and finally, a bit of sex.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Became the first film from new distributor Relativity Media to be #1 at the box office for the weekend.

HOME OR THEATER: Although some of the digital effects are kinda cool, for the most part this works equally as effectively at home.

FINAL RATING: 6/10

TOMORROW: Casino Royale