(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Tue 28 October 2025 18:45, UK
All art is subjective, and that sentiment might apply more to comedy than any other form of cinema. Some viewers adore lowbrow, crude, and puerile humour, others prefer absurdism, and some like their laughs to come from scattershot one-liners, although there are no prizes for guessing how Roger Ebert felt about the more scatological side of the genre.
The job of a critic is to take an impartial view of everything they watch, but sometimes, the thing they’re watching offends them so deeply that they can’t help but make it personal. Ebert railed against countless films throughout his career, and one of the easiest ways to get under his skin was to aim for the lowest common denominator and favour gross-out over smart screenwriting.
The body swap comedy has been done to death in innumerable different permutations, and it takes a special idea to bring anything fresh to a worn-out fad. When director David Dobkin recruited Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman to headline 2001’s The Change-Up, he didn’t accomplish that goal. Instead, he went for R-rated yuks, and Ebert was almost apoplectic with rage.
“The Change-Up is one of the dirtiest-minded mainstream releases in history,” he introduced a 1.5-star review. “It has a low opinion of men, a lower opinion of women, and the lowest opinion of the intelligence of its audience. It is obscene, foul-mouthed, scatological, creepy, and perverted. As a bonus, it has the shabbiest low-rent main titles I’ve seen this side of YouTube.”
As tends to be the case in every movie of its ilk, Reynolds and Bateman’s lifelong best friends end up assuming each other’s lives and identities. The former’s carefree bachelor and the latter’s happily married father get a taste of how the other half lives, and mishaps inevitably ensue. There wasn’t an original bone in its body, so Dobkin and his stars opted to add increasing levels of raunch, which didn’t work in their favour.
Ebert was of the belief that The Change-Up “sets out to violate and transgress as many standards of civilised conduct as it can,” pointing out that “faithful readers know I treasure cheerful vulgarity” to make it clear that he didn’t have anything against R-rated comedies in general, just this particularly egregious example that made his blood boil with how all-encompassingly awful it was.
“This film, in fact, seems to go out of its way to be vulgar and offensive, as if ‘adult’ audiences crave such an assault,” he ranted. “Anyone who enjoys this film cannot fairly be considered an adult. Pity about the R-rating. It will keep out those callow enough to enjoy it.”
What happens when you take the standard body swap formula, dial the obscenities and vulgarity way beyond 11, continually up the levels of revulsion, and depict the film’s two main characters as “low and crude human beings with no respect for decency?” You get The Change-Up, apparently, which failed miserably among critics and barely squeaked into profitability at the box office, making the whole thing feel entirely redundant and wholly unnecessary.
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