The cinematic dad jokes are clawing their way out of some obscure hole with this one. Family Switch, directed by McG and written by Adam Sztykiel and Victoria Strouse, stars Jennifer Garner, Ed Helms, Emma Myers, and Brady Noon in a quick and predictable holiday comedy. Reflective of its early 2000s blueprint, Freaky Friday, Family Switch takes the Random Old Lady magic to another level, meaning that, instead of two people switching bodies, the entire family swaps, and somehow the baby lands in the dog’s body!
The movie runs for one hour and 41 minutes, starting with what Netflix has pegged as the two only archetypes for teenage siblings: the nerdy one and the athletic one. CC, played by Emma Myers, is a hopeful pro soccer player who can’t wait to leave the house so she can escape what, according to her, is an overbearing mom. Additionally, her complicated relationship with her mother and complete disregard for her continuous attempts at stabilizing their relationship lead to her being physically incapable of being nice to anyone for the first twenty minutes of the movie, which does nothing to help her already bland and pretty surface-level characterization. On the other hand, we have CC’s brother, Wyatt, a quiet and astonishingly smart kid who is already applying to Yale as a ninth grader. He’s the classic nerdy character whose only friends are a trio of middle-aged guys who like to play random videogames online, talks like a robot whose only function is to either a) spill interesting facts or, b) overcomplicate a single sentence with words that were absolutely not necessary. Furthermore, Netflix’s depiction of High School needs to stop at once. Cliques might exist, and stereotypes stain everyone at some point in their lives, but somebody needs to knock Netflix off this bizarre idea that kids dancing in the middle of the hallway or doing this unnecessarily long handshake with random people is normal, it’s not! Don’t do it at home kids, it will not end well for you.
On the parents’ side, we have Jess and Bill Walker, played by Jennifer Garner and Ed Helm respectively. Jess is an overworked mother that is trying her hardest to climb the corporate ladder and Bill is a relaxed High School teacher that kind of resembles Shaggy’s personality from Scooby Doo. The issue with them is that, of course, their connection has been weakened by long exposure to neglect. Jess is constantly busy and Bill is outrageously consumed by his own world. Hence, when Christmas rolls around, they decide to do something together as a family. However, it all backfires on them when the kids, surprise surprise, don’t want to do their holiday tradition of filming family videos anymore because “they’re too old for that,” hence they’re left hanging on to the hope that the family’s visit to the planetarium will somehow fix the fissures in their bonds. Because what could be better to mend a relationship than watching a planetary alignment that only happens every other century? Oh, that’s right, getting a visit from the mandatory holiday comedy Random Old Person that utters some strange sentences that most definitely have some hidden meaning, which the characters remain oblivious to until the very end of the movie.
After the whole swap of bodies occurs and the family realizes they’re all in the wrong bodies, the writers of the movie apparently had a lightbulb moment and thought to themselves: putting the baby inside of the dog’s body would be so funny, and it would be even funnier if the family promptly forgot that the baby is, in fact, inside of the dog, and have them keep carrying around the dog like it’s the baby instead of their actual child. Oh, yes, that would be gold. Because… that’s what happened. Consequently, CC and her mom and Wyatt and his dad tumble through their corresponding counterpart’s day and realize that other people kind of have it hard too, and that maybe they’re not the only ones with a rough life. Several public farts, failed interviews, high school flirting, and forced kisses later the family destroys a car as they zoom through LA in order to swap their bodies back, but of course, the secret to swapping didn’t lay in the planetarium, but rather the family finding a way back to each other again…and the random lady, whose name we find out halfway through the movie, making one final appearance as she wishes them Merry Christmas and wiggles her magic at them, returning them to their original bodies.
Objectively speaking, this was not a bad movie. I laughed several times and found some moments relatable and somewhat sentimental, but there is no single trademark that could potentially highlight this movie from any other holiday comedy. It feels somewhat unfair to rate it out of ten because it all depends on what spectators are expecting from the film, and how willing they are to watch something for the silly fun of it even though they can already predict what will happen.
