The Change-Up opened on August 5, 2011, putting two lifelong friends into each other's bodies after a drunken wish and then letting the fallout run for the rest of the movie.
Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds start exactly where audiences expected them: Bateman as the family man drowning in obligation, Reynolds as the bachelor who avoids commitment and is secretly miserable about it. The against-type part arrives the morning after, when each has to play the other, so Bateman spends most of the film as a reckless slob and Reynolds as a panicking lawyer and father.
The premise leans harder into raunch than most body-swap comedies dare, which is part of why it never picked up the belated affection that Bateman's Arrested Development or Reynolds's later comic work did. It is blunter and meaner than the more wholesome version of the same trick, Freaky Friday.
The film works best now as a showcase for the pair's chemistry, two performers who would go on to define very different comic personas, here still figuring out how far they could push against each other.
