Jennifer Garner is Jess, a busy mother with a successful career. She doesn't really like her daughter, CC (Emma Myers), focusing on playing football matches ahead of other ways to fill her time. Jess is married to Bill (Ed Helms), and neither of them seem to realise how their son, Wyatt (Brady Noon), is doing at school. Wyatt is a very smart young man, but he's very uncool and a bit miserable. There's also a baby. And a dog. This is the family at the heart of Family Switch, a film in which a familiar Freaky Friday scenario happens to the mother and daughter, to the father and son, AND to the baby and family dog.
Based on the book "Bedtime For Mommy", by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Family Switch is brought to the screen by writers Victoria Strouse and Adam Sztykiel, and director McG. While none of these names tend to instil pure joy in the hearts of most film fans, I would say that all of them have had times when they have managed to deliver decent entertainment (and McG has been working particularly well on Netflix projects). Sadly, Family Switch fails in almost every way it tries to work.
It’s a Christmas film that doesn’t make any decent use of the holiday, a bodyswap movie that mistakenly assumes more is better, and a star vehicle that wastes the more established names in the cast. And you just know that everyone involved thought they were making something in line with the classics of this particular sub-genre, which explains the scene in which the characters onscreen cheekily reference a number of other titles that are all much better than this.
Garner and Helms get the worse end of the stick, perhaps simply due to them having to act like teenagers for most of the runtime, but both Noon and Myers improve every scene that they’re in. Both of the younger screen stars are likable and funny, and I will look forward to whatever is next for them much more than I will look forward to whatever Garner and Helms line up. There aren’t many standouts in the supporting cast, although both Rita Moreno and Matthias Schweighöfer have fun in their small roles, and the less said about the CGI helping to visualize the swapped behaviour of the baby and the family dog the better.
There are a couple of laughs here and there (I don’t mind a heavily-signposted fart gag on occasion), a dance number that feels shoe-horned in to remind you of other dance numbers we have seen in this kind of fare, and a very safe and predictable finale you could almost write up once everything has been set up in the earliest scenes.
Not a good Christmas movie (I really wouldn’t even count it, considering the lack of holiday spirit, and I am very easygoing with movie labels), not a good bodyswap movie, and not a very good comedy. It’s just not good.
3/10
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One of those movies that probably sounded better as a high concept pitch: It's like Freaky Friday except everyone swaps bodies! One of those reasons I've only activated Netflix for about 1 month in the last 5 years.
ReplyDeleteOh, it was absolutely a high concept pitch that should have been more refined.
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