The 9 Most Scathing Critical Responses to The Change-Up

Judging from the critical consensus, it appears the latest R-rated comedy in this summer of R-rated comedies is apparently the worst. Reviews for The Change-Up are even more scathing than reviews for The Hangover Part II -- and critics hated that one. Sorry, Ryan Reynolds; it seems this is just not your summer after all. Ahead, the nine most blistering reviews of The Change-Up.

9. "Don't start a movie with a baby projectile pooping in his dad's mouth. Please. Just don't." -- Matt Pais, Red Eye

8. "Mitch is funny until his character turns into a sad, misogynist troll. After the switch, the film indulges freely in its puerility and disgust with families and women. The real change-up is to platitudes in the end, tough to fall for after watching Dave's wife (Leslie Mann) taking a noisy dump." -- Peter Keough, Boston Phoenix

7. "Robo-babies who slam their heads against crib bars aren't funny. Robo-babies who shoot a dark-brown milkshake substance out of their anuses and into Jason Bateman's mouth aren't funny, and the guys who thought this sequence up have something wrong with them... seriously. You're sitting there and thinking, 'Somebody actually got paid money to think this up and then shoot it for a mainstream big-studio feature?' Only a society in the last death throes of social degeneration and corruption would laugh at a scene as low as this, and believe me, hundreds were laughing their asses off at Monday night's screening. I'm not talking about the vulgarity (although I am to some extent) -- I'm talking about the primitive mentality that would find this kind of thing even faintly amusing." -- Jeff Wells, Hollywood-Elsewhere

6. "Let's give this ghastly studio comedy a Truthiness in Advertising award, if nothing else. In the movie, Jason Bateman's earnest lawyer and family man, Dave, gets a faceful of feces while changing a diaper. The trailers don't fully capture the moment, but at least they suggest it with a quick cut to a brown smudge that should serve as a vulgarity alert. Or, for the target audience, a vulgarity guarantee, since that's what the production is peddling and what it delivers." -- Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal

5. "For the trouble of disrobing, all of these female characters are rewarded with sexual rejection, in two cases because their male partners are horrified to learn that women have working assholes. One of these women persecuted for defecating is played by Mann who, as usual, is so naturalistic that her character's humiliation is actually heartbreaking." -- Karina Longworth, LA Weekly

4. "In this one-joke frat house masturbatory fantasy about two guys who exchange bodies for no reason except to keep a DOA movie going for almost two hours, even the title makes no sense. There is no such thing as a 'change-up.' I could understand 'change-over' or 'trade-off,' but the invasion of one person's persona into another person's frame is not a 'change-up.' Never mind. Nothing else jells in this farrago of idiocy, either." -- Rex Reed, New York Observer

3. "[F]inally, date rapists and people who think Tucker Max is too 'old-fashioned' have their very own Freaky Friday." -- Drew McWeeny, HitFix

2. The Change-Up is a studio hybrid both so advanced and so primitive it defies parsing. Partly derived from the old Freaky Friday switcheroo comedy, partly bent on what feels like the pre-Enlightenment theme of men fretting over whether to live selfishly or with personal and social responsibility, it's post-Hays code, state-of-the-art obscenity mingled with the pre-feminist option of treating women as problems against which a man's life is defined. If Philip Roth and Ivan Reitman had a celluloid baby? Does it come from the future? Or did its everything-and-nothing-ness lower from the sky in a toxic, crowd-sourcing cloud? Have we burned our gender constructs so far into the ground they now have to be taught to us by soullessly motivated filmmakers beholden to brainless focus testing?" -- Michelle Orange, Movieline

1. "The film, in fact, seems to go out of its way to be vulgar and offensive, as if 'adult' audiences crave such an assault. Anyone who enjoys this film cannot fairly be considered an adult. Pity about the R rating. It will keep out those callow enough to enjoy it." -- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times