Review: The Switch

You’ve already met the characters in The Switch. Jason Bateman’s neurotic New Yorker has been kicking around since Woody Allen swapped stand up for film, and Jennifer Aniston continues to hone the character she’s been playing for the past 20-odd years.

Anyone with a few rom coms under their belt will also know their friends, a tag team of gently mocking/slightly kooky best buds played by Jeff Goldblum and Juliet Lewis. You’ll know all the players intimately, but The Switch’s ‘thing’, its main selling point, isn’t its actors but its story based on the book Baster by Jeffrey Eugenides.

Wally and Kassie are BFFs, and with Kassie’s biological clock ticking like a nail bomb, she becomes a fan of artificial insemination overnight – even throwing a party to celebrate the big event. It’s here that a shit-faced Wally drops the intended donor’s spunk down a sink, but is lucid enough to replace it with his own before passing out and forgetting all about it. Skip seven years later, and Kassie’s back from living in the country, with a precautious, neurotic son in tow. Pennies drop and disaster is narrowly avoided, but will everyone find happiness in the end? Yes… yes they will.

Criticising The Switch for relying on genre clichés may be like criticising an action film for having too many explosions, but even on the erratic sliding scale of mainstream rom coms, this is risk-free, gelatinous fare. The squawking of shorthand characters impossible to care about drowns out occasionally sharp dialogue. The biggest shame though is the film’s main point, it’s irreverent story, is told by tacking together of bunch of contrived sequences, making the film feel like an extended advert for all mediocre rom coms.

The Switch is released on DVD and Blu-ray 17 January 2011.