**½
THE CHANGE-UP
Directed by: David Dobkin
Written by: Jon Lucas and Scott Moore
Starring: Jason Bateman, Ryan Reynolds, Leslie Mann, and Alan Arkin
At: Boston Common, Fenway, suburbs
Running time: 112 minutes
Rated: R (language, language, language, one adult-movie shoot, and many, many breasts)
Yes, there’s a masculinity crisis in Hollywood. And, yes, it’s sort of depressing to watch another comedy go out of its way to reinforce its protagonists’ heterosexuality. But if I must watch two men not be gay together for the 300th time this summer, those men should be Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds.
“The Change-Up’’ has a hollow conceit. The hard-working married father of three (Bateman) and the single sexoholic vulgarian (Reynolds) envy the perceived liberties of their respective lifestyles. An evening of drinking and commiseration culminates in the two of them urinating side by side into a public fountain in Atlanta presided over by a kind of spiteful goddess statue that must pity them. When they awake the next morning the dad discovers, to his horror, that he’s the vulgarian and the vulgarian discovers that he’s the dad. The setup is crudely overplayed, with projectile poop and verbal come-ons aimed at the reliably pungent Leslie Mann, who plays Mrs. Bateman and is the longest-suffering woman in so-called bromantic comedy (mentioning her marriage to Judd Apatow, who popularized and problematized the dynamic, only belabors the point).
