The Change-Up (2011)

Despite all the boobs, The Change-Up is very fair to its female characters-well, at least to Mann and Wilde, who both ring true, even if Wilde is almost too good to be true...It sounds like a trifling detail, but those details are sorely missing from most "date movies," in which even the women laughing in the audience exit feeling like they're the butt of the joke.

Distilled to its basics, it's little more than a sit-com that has been tarted up with scenes of projectile poop, odd sexual fetishes, and knife wielding babies. It all seems a little tired and, more importantly, not as funny as it should be.

The film's final dialogue exchange reveals The Change-Up to be one long setup to a bromantic joke that, in a roundabout way, maybe comes closer than any previous film to fulfilling that woebegone subgenre's implicit homoerotic endgame.

It's hard not to be disappointed with The Change-Up, which in the end follows the basic conventions of the switched-identity genre, if more profanely, changing up not much at all.

Yet as is so often the case with the frat-boy genre to which this film panders, so many gags feel like desperate, self-conscious attempts to be outrageous that the effect of its abundant cursing and boob shots is more depressing than delirious.