"The Switch" is a romantic comedy about a woman (Jennifer Aniston) who decides to have a baby through artificial insemination, much to the dismay of her best friend (Jason Bateman.) It doesn't exactly sound like your typical romantic comedy plot, and it isn't. It's a very study in mediocrity; it was bad, but not aggressively bad. It was average in every sense of the word, except for the actual comedy. Funny it ain't.
Jennifer Aniston has made more than her share of terrible romantic comedies, and while this one is considered an enormous flop, it wasn't as blatantly horrible as some of the others she's done (like "The Bounty Hunter," for example.) It's just bland, pale, dull, and utterly joyless. Jason Batman, however, is a very good actor and has made some good films. Why he signed on for this white-bread "comedy" is beyond me.
The very first problem with the movie is that the characters aren't given any depth. The plot about the insemination is announced almost immediately. We have no idea who these people are, and everything we do know about them, we learn because they tell us directly. We know that they are best friends because they repeat it over and over. We know that Jason Bateman is neurotic not because we've seen him act that way, but because Jennifer Aniston lets us know it immediately. We know that Aniston's character is "fun and not afraid of anything" because Bateman tells us so. Therefore, when we get into the complex issue of a pregnancy, we have no idea how this is going to affect her or why we should care.
The second problem is an extreme lack of chemistry. The leads have no chemistry, and later on, when Jennifer Aniston's child comes into the picture, they have no chemistry with him. Also, the little boy is an alright actor, but the script gives him no room to breathe. Lots of movie studios find it adorable to give small children unbelievably complicated lines so they sound pretentious and precocious, but they have weighed this adorable boy down with the weight of excessive, unnecessary lines. He's a little boy; give him a little room to be a little boy and we will love him for his character and natural presence, not his awkward lines.
As far as comedy, there isn't any. The theater I saw the film in was almost painfully silent, aside from a few light, halfhearted chuckles once or twice. This is a comedy that is thoroughly, painfully bland.
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