FILMS exploring benign transmogrification – “Trading Places”, “Big” – achieved fame because writers and directors acknowledging the theme’s impossibility explored beyond its inherent comedy values.

Writers John Lucas and Scott Moore employ gutter vocabulary, pooing and peeing as major devices for comedy in “The Change Up”. Director David Dobkin has accepted what they have wrought. They may be facts of life, but without wit, they are not the stuff of comic merit.

Corporate lawyer Dave (Jason Bateman) has a handsome wife Jamie (Leslie Mann) and three small daughters. If he brings off a major deal, a partnership is in prospect. His best buddy Mitch (Ryan Reynolds) is an unmarried hedonist with aspirations as an actor and a calendar crammed with sexual contacts. They accidentally change bodies.

Bateman and Reynolds give the dodgy material the best-possible shot.  Leslie Mann in a bravura speech bemoaning Jamie’s injured self-respect delivers admirable pathos and her scenes feeding the twins and preparing for bed are visually delectable. Projecting a sedate corporate facade behind which lives a fun girl, Olivia Wilde gives a choice portrayal of Dave’s colleague Sabrina who falls for his body unaware of who is living in it.

Three teenagers at the end of the row laughed mightily throughout the film. The rest of the audience kept their opinions covered.

At Dendy, Hoyts and Limelight