If you thought Jason Bateman sniffing a cup of sperm in the poster for last year’s The Switch was distasteful, I’m dying to know what colourful adjectives you’d use to describe a scene in The Change-Up where the actor is showered in the mouth with baby poo.  Keep in mind that this is the first joke of the movie, so don’t go wasting all your best ones – Rabelaisian? Fescennine? F***ing disgusting? – just yet, as there’s plenty more where that came from.

So yes, The Change-Up is all kinds of nasty. That much we’ve established.  But is it funny? Well, in a juvenile, racist, sexist, and child-abusive kind of way, I daresay it can be hilarious. I’m not particularly proud of laughing at this vulgar cliché of a movie, but dammit, laugh I did. And at the end of the day, making you laugh is just about all a comedy really needs to do.

Still, a touch of originality would have been nice. We’ve seen the body-swap setup play out so many times, the genre just about fills its own bargain bin at K-mart.  That being said, The Change-Up does deserve credit for being the first body-swap movie to explore the question of sex without any restraint. For instance, if your mind is placed in someone else’s body, and you sleep with someone other than your usual partner, is that considered cheating? And is it wrong to masturbate using somebody else’s tackle?

These are the questions facing family man Dave (Jason Bateman; Horrible Bosses) and his womanising best friend Mitch (Ryan Reynolds; Green Lantern). Dave is an ambitious lawyer by day, married father-of-three by night who often ponders – usually in the presence of his saucy secretary Sabrina (Olivia Wilde; Cowboys and Aliens) — what his life would be like if he hadn’t put a ring on it. (It being Leslie Mann’s finger.) Mitch, meanwhile, is a lazy pot-headed bachelor who sleeps with all kinds of girls he knows only on a first-name basis (if that).  Whilst relieving themselves in a fountain one drunken night, the two profess a desire for each other’s lives. Sure enough, the fountain abides. Dave is now Mitch and Mitch is now Dave. Or, more to the point, Dave is now single and Mitch is now married. Dilemma!

For actors, the lure of body-swap comedies is that they essentially get to play two very different characters in the same movie. Before the switch, Bateman and Reynolds play the same characters they’ve always played, but after the switch, Bateman becomes a foul-mouthed man-child, while Reynolds develops a moral conscience. It’s fun to watch the two effectively parody each other, and it’s abundantly clear they’re having a blast doing so too. It’s undeniable that, alongside a wilful Oliva Wilde and sympathetic Leslie Mann, Bateman and Reynolds considerably elevate what is otherwise fairly derivative stuff.

As the film’s marketing campaign is quick to declare, the folks responsible for the screenplay are Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, aka the chaps behind The Hangover. That film became an instant classic due to its unpredictability, whereas The Change-Up is about as predictable as a movie gets. Thankfully, though, these guys still understand crude comedy, and director David Dobkin (The Wedding Crashers) understands how best to film it. They also know that if they want to stand out from all the other crude comedies this year, they’re going to have to be extra filthy. So filthy, it’s rumoured they scrawled the screenplay on the back of a doped-up hooker with a tattoo gun! (Not really, although that does just about describe a scene from the movie. As I said: filthy!)

So don’t say you weren’t warned: this movie isn’t for everyone. That much was clear when Universal offered critics complimentary beer and pizza prior to screening the film, which is their roundabout way of saying that this is one for the boys. Oh, and that it’s best enjoyed drunk. But you already knew that, right?

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