The Change-Up (1:52, R) — fantasy: body switching, 2nd string, original

At one time there were a couple of body-switching movies every year, but they've been thinning out lately, with Son of the Mask (2005), The Shaggy Dog (2006), and 17 Again (2009) being the most recent (unless you count 2008's Benjamin Button, which was a kinda, sorta example). So Producer-Director David Dobkin must have figured that what the subgenre needed was a good shot in the ... um, no, not arm, uh, mouth! Yeah, that's it, a shot in the mouth! With a nice, juicy jet of baby poo.

Yes, this movie is R-rated. And not because, like its Chuckoid predecessors or the aspiring- to-respectability Fallen, it's loaded with graphic, gratuitous violence. No, THIS movie's R stands for repeated ribaldry and raunch. Fortunately, I have a high tolerance — if not an outright appreciation — for such fare. YMMV.

To be fair, there are some quiet scenes, a few moments that verge on tender and sentimental, but they serve mainly as points of contrast.

Jason Bateman plays Dave Lockwood, a steady, serious, hard-working guy, a successful lawyer, decent husband, and devoted father of a young girl and twin infants. He occasionally takes his nose off the grindstone long enuf to lament "I missed all the sex and the drugs and the bad decisions."

Ryan Reynolds (on display elsewhere as Green Lantern) plays Mitch Planko, Dave's best bud since 2nd grade, who didn't miss ANY of that stuff. HIS problem is that he's adrift, aimless, unshaven, and unaccomplished. He looks at Dave's happy family and enviously remarks "You're surrounded by people who give a sh¡t about you!". (He isn't aware how literally true this is.)

After a boys' night out, they're both tipsy and stop to take a leak into a huge ornamental stone fountain in a city park. While a dour marble goddess looks down on them in evident disapproval, they simultaneously blurt "I wish I had your life." As they zip up and walk away, we see she's now smiling. Next morning their wishes have come true.

They fail to convince Dave's wife Jamie (Leslie Mann) of what's happened, so they decide to maintain the pretense until they can once again pee in the fountain to reverse the switch. This turns out to be harder than they expected, because it's being relocated and can't immediately be tracked down. So each gets to play the other for a few days.

They start out not being very good at each others' jobs — or the rest of their lives, either — but then gradually start getting the hang of it. Not so much so that they want to STAY switched, of course, but they each learn something about the proper balance between seriousness and slackerdom.

The script and pacing are uneven, and some of the situations are played overbroadly, which undercuts whatever sense of realism the completely unrealistic premise has tried to achieve for those who have willingly suspended their disbelief. It's impossible to believe, for instance, that even the fake Dave would behave so boorishly in the merger meeting or be so cavalier about babies playing with sharp kitchen instruments. And, despite the fact that every guy alive feels free to keep reading the menu after he's already ordered, the real Dave is such a straight arrow that even Olivia Wilde is unlikely to lure him into making sportive use of his friend Mitch's handy romantic equipment.

The convention for such movies is that all personalities are returned to their rightful bodies in time for the denouement, during which all engage in saccharine bromides about how they've learned to appreciate what they have in life. So too here. In between there are enuf adventures and chuckles to keep you reasonably well entertained, as long as you aren't expecting Shakespeare. It aspires to be a comedy, and there are plenty of errors, but it's no Comedy of Errors.