The Change-Up
2011 · Directed by David Dobkin
Original language: English
- comedy
The story
Lifelong friends Dave and Mitch are envious of the other's life. Mitch thinks Dave has it all: a beautiful, loving family and a high-paying job at a prestigious law firm. But Dave thinks Mitch’s stress-free playboy life without obligation or consequence is the real dream come true. One fateful drunken night, they both admit that they wish they had the other’s life while peeing in a fountain when lightning strikes. The next morning, they wake up, hungover, in each other’s bodies! With time not on their side, Mitch and Dave comically struggle to avoid completely destroying each other’s lives before they can find a way to get their old ones back.
What it’s like
Bright, saturated suburban daylight and sun-washed Atlanta streets give this body-swap comedy a glossy, mid-2010s studio look: clean digital images, warm interiors with lamp glow, and plenty of medium two-shots that let the two leads trade bluntly funny beats. Its vibe is loose, sweaty and raunchy, with a sarcastic, slacker-friendly edge that sits comfortably on a lazy weekend afternoon or a couch night with friends. The pace is brisk and sitcom-like, with improvised-feeling back-and-forth and gags that land fast, while the emotional core is simple: two restless men learn what their lives actually cost each other and come to value what they have. The swapped-body premise produces a lot of crude humor, including frank sexual content, nudity, drinking and drug use, and profanity throughout, and the violence is mostly slapstick. Some sequences are uncomfortable rather than dangerous. It suits viewers who want a crude, laugh-out-loud farce about friendship, marriage and midlife envy, and it is not a gentle or family-friendly pick.
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