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75This picture belongs to Jason Bateman, who, after years of playing the second or third banana (and plenty of times being the best thing in a given film), finally gets to show off his considerable gifts as the co-lead in a mainstream comedy.
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75By turns rowdy and rueful, The Switch is a comedy with serious ramifications, not least of which is the question, what makes a family?
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75The Switch, to its credit, really is about a boy, who with the help of a sensitive, sad-eyed kid, stands a chance of becoming a man.
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75Aniston's work opposite the screen's premiere mild-mannered funnyman shows her at her most engaged and pitch perfect.
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75Squeezes fresh laughs out of what is, in essence, a rather startlingly post-Freudian, nature-trumps-nurture view of child development.
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70Despite a virtually unplayable premise, The Switch overcomes this handicap to turn itself into a friendly, offbeat romantic comedy.
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70It's funny, clever, touching and real.
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70Aniston and Bateman keep things both light and dark when they should, and Robinson's Sebastian steals everyone's heart.
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Distinguishes itself with three-dimensional characters and an engaging storyline.
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63Around the halfway point it starts getting interesting and the people who put it together are at least working in a realm of reasonable intelligence and wit and respect for the audience.
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63You have to overlook a whole lot of guff in order to enjoy the slight but pleasurable entertainment of The Switch.
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63It would be nice to argue that the good outweighs the bad in The Switch, but it's a wash.
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63There aren't enough surprises to justify the title, but The Switch produces sufficient light for a late-summer diversion.
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Saddled with the responsibility of carrying the film, Bateman acquits himself admirably by playing it straight, developing a genuinely convincing and affecting chemistry with Robinson and taking his character's repression seriously.
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50It's subpar sitcom.
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50Ranks somewhere between the barely watchable "The Back-Up Plan" and the good but wildly overrated "The Kids Are All Right."
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50The movie's flaw is impossible to ignore, turning on the most tired of romantic comedy conventions: Someone knows something, and all that person has to do is say it, and the movie is over and everything's great.
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50This is a romantic comedy, not a sci-fi adventure tale. But the actions, choices and general behavior of the characters are oddly removed from what goes in the real world.
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50The romantic comedy has never had a star as depressing as Jennifer Aniston. It's not the movies - well, it isn't simply the movies.
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50The wonder here is that Bateman and the child actor spark off each other quite delightfully. For a few precious scenes, when father and son are alone, the movie is actually amusing, even touching.
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50Taken on its own terms, it's a light, sweet, curiously enjoyable misfit romance, whose real star is not Aniston but her magnificently awkward Lothario, Jason Bateman.
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50The first third of The Switch, directed by Josh Gordon and Will Speck, is so bizarre that it leads you to wonder if, through some miraculous lack of oversight, the movie will blaze an unpredictable path. No such luck.
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50Ultimately The Switch can't escape the constraints of its own formula.
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42Turns out it's hard to make one man swapping his sperm for another's seem cute, as much as The Switch tries.
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40It all works out agreeably enough, albeit in strict adherence to rom-com formula, right down to the obligatory wacky-best-friend roles given to space cadets Jeff Goldblum and Juliette Lewis.
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40His (Bateman) performance is fun. Too bad The Switch is not.
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40Despite winning turns by Lewis and an on-form Goldblum, the laughs are in short supply.
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40Marvel at the desperate spectacle of three comic leads-Aniston, Bateman and Watchmen's Patrick Wilson as the original donor-being outperformed by the wide-eyed Robinson, a quiet collector of silences. These stars will never be as young as he is; you wish they'd all stop trying.
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40Amiable fluff that takes its time learning how to walk, talk, and generally act like the kid-centric rom-com that it is.
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40An unfunny, manipulative romance about two unlikable people and their prop of a son, the pic mangles the premise of its source material ("Baster," a 1996 short story by Pulitzer-winning novelist Jeffrey Eugenides) in ways that ought to baffle viewers of all sociopolitical stripes.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 12 out of 22
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Mixed: 7 out of 22
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Negative: 3 out of 22
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"The Switch" has its fun and joy thanks to the weird chem of Jason Bateman and Jennifer Aniston....but its all too obvious.
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