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The Switch Review
27 Aug 2010
Critics rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Reviewed by Tom Charity , LOVEFiLM
The Switch

The love of your life tells you that she is going to find a sperm donor to father her child... What do you do?

a)    Volunteer
b)    Suggest a few likely dads and organize a baby shower
c)    Talk her out of it
d)    Sulk and seek a more compatible mate

Cast details

Wally (Jason Bateman) would have liked consideration, but mostly he goes with ( c ) and when that doesn’t work he gravitates towards sulking. But he does go to Kassie’s insemination party (how chic!), where he meets the lucky donor – desperately good looking, college teacher Roland (Patrick Wilson) – gets plastered, and accidentally spills Roland’s sperm sample down the sink. Could happen to anyone, right?

It’s at that point he makes surely the most critical decision of his life. He unzips his fly and refills the cup with his own seed. The next morning no one is the wiser – not even Wally, who was so drunk he has blacked out the whole sorry episode.

Cut to seven years later, and Kassie (yes, yes, it’s Jennifer Aniston) returns to New York with her offspring in tow, and neurotic, hypochondriac Wally can’t help noticing that neurotic, hypochondriac seven-year-old Sebastian (Thomas Robinson) is his kind of kid – which is to say, difficult and socially inept. Not that anyone has put one and one together just yet...

I haven’t read ‘The Baster’, the original short story by Jeffery Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides; Middlesex), but according to the author himself, he wrote a story about an unattractive man who falls in love with a beautiful woman; “it deals, comedically, with the Darwinist question: is it better to be good-looking or clever?”. The film… well, Jason Bateman may not be Owen Wilson, but no matter how badly they dress him he’s not exactly Quasimodo either.

Jason Bateman in The Switch

Still, Mr Eugenides doth protest too much. This is Hollywood, after all – to make a romantic comedy in which the male lead is a misfit who perpetrates such a foul deed, well, it’s rather surprising they didn’t cast Seth Rogen and be done with it. An actor who seems to have no problem playing less than admirable characters (in the first scene he’s described as a “beady-eyed boy-man”), Bateman does sell Allan Loeb’s witty one-liners and sarcastic asides. He’s consistently funny, and even though he always says the wrong thing at the wrong time, we’re confident his heart is in the right place.

Bateman is consistently funny, and even though he always says the wrong thing at the wrong time, we're confident his heart is in the right place.

As for Aniston, she’s fine, but let’s face it, she looks at least ten years too young to play a woman in her mid to late 40s. Co-directors Josh Gordon and Will Speck (Blades of Glory) do a good job with the characters and the relationships, but they inadvertently undermine the love story by putting so much focus on Wally’s bonding sessions with Sebastian (good as Thomas Robinson is). We are convinced that father and son have chemistry, but mom and dad? Not so much. Imagine, if you will, Bateman playing opposite Catherine Keener, and you’d have a movie that hit so much harder (albeit to a fraction of the audience).

Finally it is impossible to review The Switch without bowing before the altar of Jeff Goldblum. Cast in a bog-standard best friend role, Goldblum brings all his immense and sorely underused skills to bear, evidently improvising randomly, and repeatedly notching up the biggest laughs of the movie. Please, someone, give this man a sit-com! 

The Switch Reviews

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