BEFORE: We're getting into it now, just like your local Lite-FM radio station, programming is (almost) all-Christmas all the time, right up until Dec. 25. Then I'll take a little break and get set up for Movie Year 18, the January plan is fairly solid, and I'm still tinkering with February, but if I had to roll with what I have now, I'd be OK.
We've got an ultra-rare DOUBLE Birthday SHOUT-out today, because it's Rita Moreno's 95th birthday, and that's cause for celebration, she's a national treasure. It's also the birthday of actress Xosha Roquemore, who's in fine company tonight.
Ed Helms carries over from "Love the Coopers". Yes, if you've been in more than one Christmas family comedy film, please come see me after the lecture, I would love to know about this for future Decembers.
THE PLOT: When a chance reader with an astrological reader causes the Walkers to wake up to a family body switch, can they unite to land a promotion, college interview, record deal and soccer tryout?
AFTER: This is a movie that tried very hard to be all things to all people - it's a school movie, it's a family comedy, teen romance, body-switch fantasy, romance, and on top of everything else, a Christmas movie. As you might imagine, there just no focus as a result, it's going to end up all over the place, shooting in every direction at once trying to land on something. So yeah, a big mess. This category was already crowded with movies like "Big", "Freaky Friday", "13 Going on 30", "17 Again" and many, many more. Yes, by Frankensteining so many genres together there's a chance that something new was brought to the family table tonight, but the result is also going to be a Frankenstein monster, a hideous thing made up of different parts that don't necessarily fit together.
I once vowed to not watch any of these body-switching things, but then I caved on "13 Going on 30" and caved again with "Freaky", so now I guess I'm "in for a penny, in for a pound". My January line-up is still two slots short of filling the month, and there's a way to squeeze in the two "Freaky Friday" movies in between two other films with Jamie Lee Curtis, so unfortunately that's under serious consideration now. Look, we all know how these work, a daughter's soul ends up in her mother's body and vice-versa, or a father and a son swap places, but now this film upped the ante by doing both AND body-swapping the baby and the dog. But once the family tracks down the baby that ran down the street in the dog's body, they just pawn the kid off on the gay German neighbor and ask him to train the dog and watch the baby. Because the four other family members are going to be busy enough dealing with swapping places with each other.
Of course there are going to be awkward moments, like when the son has to kiss his sister and pretend he's his father kissing his mother, because the neighborhood Karens are trying to "save" their marriage by making them kiss. Papa Walker also has to attend his son's college interview and he totally tanks it, of course, while Mama Walker has to play soccer in her daughter's body and she catches the ball with her hands (against the rules, apparently) and then helps an injured member of the opposing team instead of scoring a game-winning goal. Umm, NITPICK POINT, why couldn't she do BOTH? It's not one of the other, she could have kicked the goal and THEN helped the injured goalie, which would have helped her daughter out AND shown her compassionate Mom side.
That's part of the reason why this whole story is so sloppy, it's tough enough keeping track of who is in who's body, but thankfully the characters keep acting like "themselves" no matter which body they're in (or which actor is playing them). But even though the teen daughter, CC, needs to give her mother's project pitch at work (and she ate ice cream before, forgetting that her mother is lactose-intolerant) and so she fails miserably by farting a lot, they never really get around to showing the teen son, Wyatt, having to do his job as a music teacher. Umm, he's at the school, doesn't his father still have to, you know, WORK? That's NITPICK POINT #2, somebody kind of dropped the ball and forgot the formula, ALL of the characters need to experience awkwardness or failure so they'll appreciate how hard things are for the other family member. They're just not going to be able to switch back to their own bodies until they gain some understanding by walking a mile in the other generation's shoes.
The story can't even follow the weird-ass rules of its own body-switching concept, like I don't think that the DOG was with them at the observatory, so how the heck did the baby swap bodies with the dog? Then they had to bring the dog with them back to the observatory when they tried to get switched back, except they didn't, because he wasn't there in the first place. Then we're supposed to believe that the father's soul could transfer to his son's body and vice versa, and one would assume that their brains and everything in their memories would transfer with their souls, but then the father (with the son's soul) is seen playing guitar at the concert, and the ability to play guitar should have been in the son's body with the son's soul. Yes, of course it was the father's band, and he needed to be seen playing in that band, and Ed Helms probably knows how to play guitar, however that character should not have known how to play guitar in that scene. There was nothing in the film about the son ALSO being able to play guitar. Just saying.
(EDIT: It turns out the dog WAS with them at the observatory. Who the hell brings their DOG to an observatory? They should not have been able to bring him inside, unless he's a service dog, which he probably is NOT. It's still a NITPICK POINT, just now of a different nature.)
It is kind of inspired to cast Rita Moreno as the old, wise, magical fortune-teller who we assume initiates the body-switching in the first place - but then why do we need all this nonsense about the planets being in alignment? There's science and then there's astrology, and any belief that the stars or the planets affect our lives or personalities is just bunk, right? There was something in the 1990's called the "Harmonic Convergence", when all of the planets were supposed to line up on one side of the sun or something, and this meant that we were all going to gain some cosmic understanding or exit the Age of Aquarius or something, or maybe the aliens would finally land and befriend us because the other planets were pointing the way to Earth. Except for some people going out into fields and chanting with crystals, absolutely nothing happened, by the way. You can look it up. Same goes for eclipses and all that, except for the sky getting dark, nothing else happens. The telescope image seen here of all the planets somehow visible at once is really horrible, too, because even if the planets DID all line up, they'd still be millions of miles away from each other, instead of what's depicted here.
For that matter, WHY is this a Christmas movie? It can't really be a Christmas movie and a school movie at the same time, because school's usually on break for the holidays, so that makes no sense, either. PICK ONE or the other. Anyway the family is so busy with their body-swapping problems that everybody just "forgot" to buy presents, and as a result of that, any mention of Christmas feels really forced or tacked-on here. This didn't need the Christmas references, it would have been exactly the same without that.
I know, I know, this sort of film isn't meant to be taken seriously, not at all, but still, I kind of expect everything to still make sense, even within the ridiculous parameters it established.
Directed by McG (director of "3 Days to Kill" and "This Means War")
Also starring Jennifer Garner (last seen in "Men, Women & Children"), Emma Myers, Brady Noon (last seen in "Marry Me"), Rita Moreno (last seen in "Jim Henson: Idea Man"), Matthias Schweighofer (last seen in "Army of Thieves"), Lincoln Sykes, Theodore Sykes, Vanessa Carrasco, Cyrus Arnold (last seen in "Hardcore Henry"), Ilia Isorelys Paulino (last seen in "Queenpins"), Jordan Leftwich, Xosha Roquemore (last seen in "Captain America: Brave New World"), Bashir Salahuddin (last seen in "Top Gun: Maverick"), Paul Scheer (last seen in "Twisters"), Helen Hong (last seen in "Inside Llewyn Davis"), Ned Bellamy (last seen in "Runawway Jury"), Andrew Bachelor (last seen in "Coffee & Kareem"), Dan Finnerty (last seen in "Dumplin'"), Howie Mandel (last seen in "Kevin Hart & Chris Rock: Headliners Only"), Rivers Cuomo (last seen in "Jagged"), Brian Bell (last seen in "Sound City"), Scott Shriner, Patrick George Wilson (last seen in "Factory Girl"), Riannah Pouncy, Pete Holmes (last heard in "The Secret Life of Pets 2"), Naomi Ekperigin (last seen in "Me Time"), Joe Mortimer, Fortune Feimster (last seen in "Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution"), Adam Lustick (last heard in "My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea"), Sebastian Quinn, Ravi Kapoor (last seen in "The Starling"), Carl McDowell, Snowden Grey (last seen in "Pain Hustlers"), Anwar Jibawi, Hannah Stocking, Mark McGrath (last seen in "Scooby-Doo"), Bob Stephenson (last seen in "Lying and Stealing"), Violet Miller, Will Adams, Bradley Uzoma, Benjamin Flores Jr. (last seen in "Ride Along"), Nate Arnold, Arjun Sriram, Connor Finnerty, Stefan Sacks (last seen in "The Onion Movie"), Kelsey Guy, Ho-Jung, Punam Patel, Jason Rogel, Alanna Fox, Lauren Ash (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Jamie Pasquinelli, Chloe Wepper (last seen in "The Last Word"), Austin Boyce, Julia Wein, Hanbit Yi, William Barletta, Alexis Frias (last seen in "Mean Girls" (2024)), Chiyeko Jones, Albert Minero Jr.
RATING: 5 out of 10 un-rowdy soccer fans
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