Yesterday, I posted a link to a promotion for the new body-switching comedy, The Change-Up. In the promo, stars Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds make fun of body-switching comedies and admit that it’s kind of a stupid premise. (Although according to Ry-Guy, it’s no more stupid than talking apes.)
The promo is hysterical. If the reviews are any indication, it’s a lot better than the movie they are promoting. But hearing the stars of a body-switching comedy openly say that it is a “f#cking stupid idea” gets you to thinking. Is it? A lot of movies have used it as a premise. How well has the idea held up?
The granddaddy of Body Switching comedies is probably the original 1976 version of Freaky Friday starring Barbara Harris and a young Jodie Foster. It was one of those high concept family comedies that Disney specialized in back in those days.
The premise: mother and daughter walk a mile in each others’ shoes. Comedy ensues and everyone learns a lesson. Freaky Friday would become the template for most body switching movies to follow including the 2003 remake and The Change-Up.
To be honest, I’m not sure I have ever watched the original all the way through. If you’ve seen one live-action Disney comedy from the 70’s, you’ve kind of seen them all. And I’ve seen enough clips from the original Freaky Friday to feel like I’ve seen the movie. So I’ve never bothered going back to fill in that potential hole in my cultural landscape.
I have seen the 2003 remake and it is surprisingly good. I think it speaks to what makes the best comedy switching comedies work. Jamie Lee Curtis is hysterical playing a teenager trapped in the body of a middle age woman. And a then-promising Lindsay Lohan is bursting with potential as a middle aged woman trying to keep her family together while going to high school.
The script itself is satisfactory for what it is. There are some good lines, but at least one too many subplots. What makes the movie work is the excellent performances. When you have Curtis and Lohan expertly mimicking one another, it works. But when you pair, say Dudley Moore and Kirk Camron in Like Father Like Son, you get lesser results.
In the 80’s there was a run of body-switching comedies. For the most part, they were lazy and shameless attempts to wring a few more dollars out of the Freaky Friday formula. Only in the 80’s, it was fathers and sons switching places rather than mothers and daughters.
The immortal comedy duo of Moore and Cameron paired up in 1987 for Like Father Like Son. The next year, Judge Reinhold and Fred Savage made more or less the same movie with Vice Versa. While just as insipid, the stars manage to raise the bar just a little.
1988 also saw the release of 18 again in which George Burns switches places with his grandson, Charlie Schlatter. Burns is coasting on “Oh God” fumes by this point. But he still carries the movie. The charmless Schlatter brings nothing to the table. The only new wrinkle in 18 Again is to add an older generation into the mix.
But not all body switching comedies have been tired retreads of Freaky Friday. In 1984, Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin shook up the formula in All of Me. Instead of focusing on the generation gap, All of Me took aim at gender differences. In the film, Tomlin is a heiress who dies and takes control of one half of Steve Martin’s body. This allows Martin to do some fantastic (but also subtle) physical comedy.
I suppose I can’t move on out of the 80’s without at least mentioning Dream a Little Dream. Honestly, I had no idea this was a body switching movie. I’ve never seen it. All I knew about it was it starred The Coreys. That was all I needed to know. It came out in 1989 just as the Coreys and body switching movies had run their course.
Many would lump 1988’s Big into the body switching category. It’s a bit of an odd fit. True, Tom Hanks does play a boy in a man’s body. But there’s no one else involved in the switch. So, I’m not sure it really counts. On the other hand, Big captures all the best elements of the genre.
Just as the body switching comedies of the 80’s recycled Freak Friday by changing the gender, 13 Going on 30 recycled Big with a gender change. The plot is almost exactly the same, but this time the little girl in the woman’s body is played by Jennifer Garner. Considering it’s a complete rip-off of Big, 13 Going on 30 is better than it has any right to be. Garner’s charisma pretty much carries the movie.
Blake Edward’s 1991 comedy, Switch, saw yet another unconventional body swap. This time Perry King plays a womanizer who is murdered and resurrected as a woman played by Ellen Barkin. Barkin was nominated for a Golden Globe for the role. But the film goes into some really uncomfortable places. And not in a funny way. By the end, the laughs are few and far between.
Speaking of weird and uncomfortable, Meg Ryan and Alec Baldwin starred in Prelude to a Kiss. You might think that the two played an impossibly attractive couple who switched places and learned an important lesson. But you’d be wrong. Instead, Ryan plays a reluctant bride who switches places with an old man. The film is quite romantic in that Baldwin’s character conitues to love Ryan’s character even when she is trapped in an old man’s body. But it is also kind of creepy.
In 1997, John Woo made a face-switching movie that wasn’t played for laughs. Face/Off paired Nicholas Cage and John Travolta as a cop and a criminal who switch faces and therefore switch lives. I have only the vaguest of memories of Face/Off. But I remember the best part was watching hammy actors like Cage and Travolta perfectly mimic each other. The rest is kind of a slow mo blur. But I’m betting there were doves.
Since I am taking the definition of “body switching” pretty liberally in this article, I could probably bring up any one of the thousands of iterations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I choose to represent them all with the dreadful 1995 comedy, Dr Jeckyll and Ms. Hyde in which Tim Daly’s mad scientist transforms into a smoking hot (and totally evil) Sean Young. Mostly, I choose to do this because Sean is an avid reader of Le Blog.
Being John Malkovich was not your conventional body switching movie. In fact, it wasn’t conventional at all. John Cusack plays a puppeteer who finds a portal into the mind of actor, John Malkovich. At first, he is a passive observer. But eventually, he figures out how to control Malkovich. The movie is wonderfully weird and original.
Those words do not apply at all to 2002’s The Hot Chick. The Hot Chick is a Rob Schneider movie. What else do you need to know? Although the movie is almost redeemed by the wonderful (and criminally underrated) Anna Faris.
I’m just going to skip over 17 Again. Sorry teenage girls. Feel free to talk about how dream Zac Efron is in the comments below.
This list is by no means exhaustive. In my research I turned up dozens of lesser known body switch movies. And if you expand your definition, there are a number of other movies that may qualify. For example, Wikipedia listed Mullhullond Drive as a body switch movie. I’ve watched Mullhullond Drive a few times and I guess I missed the body switching. But then again, I’m not sure David Lynch could fully explain that one.
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