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80Despite all the boobs, The Change-Up is very fair to its female characters-well, at least to Mann and Wilde, who both ring true, even if Wilde is almost too good to be true...It sounds like a trifling detail, but those details are sorely missing from most "date movies," in which even the women laughing in the audience exit feeling like they're the butt of the joke.
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Aug 4, 201170The real summit meeting here may be between the two leads. They're good at their specialties - Reynolds's casual jock studliness and Bateman's nervous white-collar introversion - and they're even better at switching into the other guy's shtick and mannerisms.
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63I still think it's a funny movie, but given its genes, it's a bit of a slacker.
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63If I must watch two men not be gay together for the 300th time this summer, those men should be Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds.
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63Distilled to its basics, it's little more than a sit-com that has been tarted up with scenes of projectile poop, odd sexual fetishes, and knife wielding babies. It all seems a little tired and, more importantly, not as funny as it should be.
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Aug 2, 201160The film's final dialogue exchange reveals The Change-Up to be one long setup to a bromantic joke that, in a roundabout way, maybe comes closer than any previous film to fulfilling that woebegone subgenre's implicit homoerotic endgame.
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50You want a change-up? Here's a change-up: How about if Hollywood stops spoon-feeding us this uninspired pablum and comes up with a fresh idea or two?
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50Sporadically hilarious but more often just plain crass and contrived.
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50While there's some decent fun to be had in this fantasy world, The Change-Up drags on so long you may need to "visit the fountain" before Dave and Mitch become themselves again.
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50The film is often funny and even more frequently vulgar, exploiting every last chance for raunch in the full-chassis exchange of two grown men. The only thing missing: male nudity.
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50The Change-Up should have fired on all cylinders. What went wrong here?
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50Instantly forgettable but intermittently funny movie.
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50The Change-Up tries so hard to be scandalous that it's a shame it doesn't do more to change up the formula.
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50No matter Bateman and Reynolds make The Change-Up seem a lot better than it is. Each earns a star in my review. The movie would be literally nothing without them.
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50Like the kids in detention, The Change-Up wants to offend your sensibilities. It sets new records for scatological humor and profanity.
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50The trouble with The Change-Up is that it doesn't change-up enough of the formula to render this new.
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50Some comedies have the knack for affrontery and shock value; The Change-Up, written by the "Hangover" team of Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, merely has the will to offend.
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50Soon enough it's back to stale jokes about spousal date nights.
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50Yet as is so often the case with the frat-boy genre to which this film panders, so many gags feel like desperate, self-conscious attempts to be outrageous that the effect of its abundant cursing and boob shots is more depressing than delirious.
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50It's hard not to be disappointed with The Change-Up, which in the end follows the basic conventions of the switched-identity genre, if more profanely, changing up not much at all.
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Sep 12, 201140Despite the promise of the title, this a fairly stale offering, plodding through the beats of a well-worn subgenre but failing to add much more than a foul mouth.
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40It's occasionally funny and a lot painful.
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40Tainted by a script (by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore) so risibly broad it makes "Wedding Crashers" look like Bergman in the Hamptons.
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40Depending on what you need from this movie, there's slight redemption in its full-on commitment to raunch, both in baby-shit–to-mouth scatology and some choice zingers.
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40If "Freaky Friday" had an impudent, foul-mouthed little brother, it would be The Change-Up, an often needlessly crass, bromance-oriented spin on the body-swap comedy.
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40The Change-Up bravely attempts to revive the dormant subgenre but it's a lame effort that grows increasingly frantic and foul-mouthed as the realization sets in that the gimmick isn't working.
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38As it is, the audience must content itself with baby poop, naughty words and the female anatomy at its pneumatic extreme, while Bateman and Reynolds's search for transcendence continues.
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38One of the dirtiest-minded mainstream releases in history. It has a low opinion of men, a lower opinion of women, and the lowest opinion of the intelligence of its audience. It is obscene, foulmouthed, scatological, creepy and perverted.
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33David Dobkin's film has the faults of raucous recent scatological comedies like "Bad Teacher," "Horrible Bosses," and "The Hangover Part II" with none of their redeeming facets. It's scattershot, sexist, and vulgar without being funny.
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30The body-swapping premise, which is stale to begin with, isn't explored with any depth, unless you find meaningful Freudian subtext in the movie's relentless anal fixation. But the premise at least sets up a farce that surpasses "The Hangover" in gleeful crudeness and profanity.
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25The charm, versatility and charisma of Jason Bateman and the camera-ready good looks of Ryan Reynolds should add up to more than a piece of crummy, amateurish junk called The Change-Up.
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20To call The Change-Up misogynistic would be to shortchange the equal-opportunity disgust this anal-regressive film demonstrates toward men, babies, old people, and corporeal existence in general.
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20The Change-Up's spin on the material transplants the same old house on a crumbled foundation, trying to disguise its creaky familiarity with the gaudiest coat of paint possible.
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10Let's give this ghastly studio comedy a Truthiness in Advertising award, if nothing else.
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0The Change-Up is the "Human Centipede" of gag-me comedies.