MOVIE REVIEWS: THE CHANGE-UP

Just as you are likely to have to do a lot of digging to find a negative review for Rise of the Planet of the Apes, you’re going to have to do the same to find a positive one for The Change-Up. It’s another one of those movies in which one character gets locked into the body of another (and vice versa). The two characters trading places are portrayed by Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds. Stephen Holden in the New York Times observes that in the beginning of the movie, a baby sends an “explosion of poop” into his father’s face while his diaper is being changed. “That muddy moment tells you exactly where you’ll be during the movie’s next hundred-plus minutes.” Carrie Rickey in the Philadelphia Inquirer does give the two actors props for their performances. “Too bad the performances get flushed away in the toilet humor,” she adds. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times finds virtually nothing to like about the movie. It is, he writes, “one 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. As a bonus, it has the shabbiest, low-rent main titles I’ve seen this side of YouTube.” And Rex Reed in the New York Observer simply dismisses the movie as “crummy, amateurish junk.”