‘Family Switch’ Movie Review: Game Cast Makes Body-Swap Comedy More Likable Than Not
Photo from Netflix
From Jeremy Kibler
Family Switch is exactly what you think it will be. It’s a silly, harmless, ultimately likable body-switching family comedy. It does in fact involve a body switch with a family of four (plus a baby and a Frenchie for good measure). The parents are played by the seemingly nicest people in the world, Jennifer Garner and Ed Helms. It doesn’t really have an original bone in its body, but director McG, writers Victoria Strouse and Adam Sztykiel, and an enthusiastic cast prove that good will can sometimes go a long way. Family Switch may be more high-spirited than outright funny, but it’s warm-hearted without collapsing into Christmas tree sappiness.
Loosely based on Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s 2010 children’s book “Bedtime for Mommy,” the film centers around the Walkers, a L.A. family who’s feeling a bit disconnected. Even with Christmas approaching, each one of them leads a busy life. Career-focused mother Jess (Garner) has to close an important deal with a pitch, so she can make partner at her architecture firm. Dad and school music teacher Bill (Helms) is also the footman of a band, “Dad or Alive,” that’s about to audition in front of a live TV broadcast. Their teenage kids, sporty CC (Emma Myers) and nerdy Wyatt (Brady Noon), have a soccer championship game and an early-college admission interview to Yale, respectively. Then there’s 2-year-old Miles (Lincoln and Theodore Sykes) and French bulldog Pickles, who both get to be held a lot. When Jess wants them all to make a happy family memory, they accompany Wyatt to a planetary alignment event at the Griffith Observatory, only for emotions to run high. Of course, all of them (except for those who can’t talk) say some version of “I wish you could be me.”
Then Rita Moreno comes in, or rather a mystical astrology reader named Angelica, played by the lovely Moreno. Angelica’s whole raison d'être seems to be keeping families happy, as she stands by her van outside the observatory. Don’t bring too much logic into it, but when Angelica offers to take the family’s picture on the steps up to a giant telescope, this leads to a cosmic phenomenon (and a broken telescope). Voila! The Walkers each wake up in another family member’s body, having no choice but to go through the disastrous day of walking in a parent or child’s shoes. Predictable life lessons will be learned, but if they don’t fix the telescope that got them into this mess, they’ll be trapped in the wrong bodies until 2162 (the year of the next planetary alignment).
Sounds complicated, but Family Switch is pretty high-concept. A well-worn, tried-and-true premise like this apparently never runs out of style, and this one doesn’t even have the strangest or most unimaginative of body-swap fantasy plot devices (remember in The Change-Up when Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman pissed into a magic fountain?). As soon as the body-trading chaos gets underway, it’s pretty amusing watching Jennifer Garner, Ed Helms, Emma Myers (Wednesday), and Brady Noon (Good Boys) play their counterparts in both comedically obvious and sly ways. It’s not much of a stretch for Garner to play an overprotective supermom, or the moms she played in both Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day and Yes Day, but she’s charming anyway and having a blast tapping back into Jenna Rink.
Speaking of Jenna Rink, 13 Going on 30, as well as Big, Freaky Friday, and 17 Again, all get name-checked in about six seconds’ time, albeit not directly. “This is a completely unique and original situation that has literally never happened before,” says CC inside of Jess’ mom body. These winking acknowledgments are briefly clever without going overboard, considering that this scenario is nothing new.
One does wonder how much more interesting it might have been had the genders actually been reversed in the swapping (rather than just mother with daughter and father with son), but that isn’t the commercially viable film that was made. Though playing it mostly safe, the script does brush up against the weirdness of one’s dad kissing their crush and siblings kissing each other without getting irreparably creepy. Some of the gross-out humor panders to the flatulent-loving younger set—CC, as Mom, gobbles down ice cream before The Big Presentation, forgetting that her mother struggles with dairy—and the entire subplot with the Walkers’ neighbor, Rolf (Matthias Schweighöfer), dog-sitting and babysitting doesn’t add much hilarity. There’s also a deep-bench supporting cast of comedians, some of whom just show up and get little to do, but Ilia Isorelýs Paulino is at least her usual lively, scene-stealing self as Jess’ assistant.
Even if it lives in the shadow of so many other body-swap comedies, Family Switch is a genial film where its cast mostly transcends connect-the-dots, somewhat trite material. Every time the plotting grows too strained and the easy pratfalls and other physical hijinks get very wacky, the actors are still game enough and make the mushy emotions feel sweet and earned. Basically, if you’re scrolling through the Netflix while wrapping presents and land on Family Switch, you could do a whole lot worse.
Rating: 2.5/5
Family Switch streams on Netflix starting November 30, 2023.
