Comedy. R. 1 hour, 52 minutes. At area theaters.
Is it possible to make a good, old-fashioned raunchy comedy in such a hopelessly jaded age, when the only way a movie gets noticed is if it’s louder, cruder and more outrageous than the one that opened a few weeks ago?
Now comes “The Change-Up,” a kind of a greatest-hits collection of a middle-aged, man-child comedy, and what is there left to say?
The movie begins with a gag involving an infant projectile-pooping into his father’s face — and that’s actually one of the more elegant bits.
The problem isn’t that nothing is sacred here — nothing should be sacred in a raunchy comedy. But nothing is funny or original.
The director, David Dobkin (“Wedding Crashers”), and the writers, Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (“The Hangover”), are so desperate and determined to shock you that they barely seem to realize they’re supposed to be telling some kind of story, one Hollywood has been replaying for years: the body-swap comedy.
Dave Lockwood (Jason Bateman) is a partner-track lawyer, married with three kids, who pines for the freedom enjoyed by his best friend, Mitch Planko (Ryan Reynolds). After drinking too much one night, the men find themselves simultaneously urinating into a fountain while wishing that they could have the other’s life. (Mitch, of course, is merely being polite.) Lightning strikes, literally, and they wake up the next morning in the wrong bodies.
The body-swap comedy has proven enduring mostly because it gives actors the chance to perform two roles: playing up their type and against it. To that end, Bateman is the saving grace of “The Change- Up.” As Dave, he’s predictably Bateman-y, sweet but a tad persnickety. As the Mitch-inhabited version of Dave, he’s giddily reborn as a foul-mouthed, fast-talking shark.
Go figure: the funniest scene in the movie is arguably the least raunchy — when the new Dave persuades his daughter Cara, played by Sydney Rouviere, to settle her disagreements at school with violence.
Earlier this summer, the charming “Bridesmaids” broke the mold of the raunchy comedy and placed females at the center. Its success inspired all manner of pop-culture debate.
“The Change-Up,” on the other hand, gets us right back to business as usual, to an age where the only thing that sells better than sex is cynicism.
