Title: The Switch
Starring: Jennifer Aniston, Jason Bateman, Patrick Wilson
Director: Josh Gordon, Will Speck
Run time: 100 mins
Certificate: 12
Released: 17th January 2011
Wally (Jason Bateman) and Kassie (Jennifer Aniston) are best friends who live in New York. Wally loves Kassie but can’t tell her for fear of rejection or spoiling their friendship. Kassie wants a child and decides to use a sperm donor. Wally gets drunk and accidentally spills the donor sperm down the sink (yes it was inexplicably just lying around in the bathroom), and in order to cover up his accident he refills the receptacle with his own special donation. He’s so drunk that he forgets the whole thing, until Kassie sees him again seven years later (Kassie had moved away from the city to raise the child) and he realises that the young boy is his own. Only then does he manage to re-piece bits of his memory of that certain night.
2010 saw a clutch of artificial insemination films hit our screens. The Switch is the best of a fairly bad bunch. What The Switch has going for it is the likes of Jason Bateman and Patrick Wilson and, dare I say it, a fairly reasonable performance from Jennifer Anniston. Bateman can make a bad film, look good. He is a very likable actor. Hell he even makes Jennifer Aniston look half decent and saves the film from the obscurity into which the likes of The Back Up Plan – starring the other, Jennifer, that can barely act, Lopez.
The Switch is a decent rom-com, it definitely a cut above The Back Up Plan and it’s better than a lot of other 2010 rom-coms as well including the likes of Date Night and The Ugly Truth.
Josh Gordon and Will Speck direct well together and the film stands up to current expectations in this department as well as being well paced. The quality of the script does vary throughout the hundred minute running time but on the whole it’s good and it’s pleasing that the main plot point – the fact that the sperm gets switched – was handled in a comedic way, insofar that the switch itself was an accident and not some contrived or spiteful act. Of course the whole film is extremely contrived, but it’s a fairly diverting way to spend an evening if you’ve nothing better to watch or if you just enjoy watching Jason Bateman.
