Game cast makes "Family Switch" a silly, harmless body-swapper

Family Switch (2023)

“Family Switch” is exactly what you think it will be. It’s a silly, harmless, ultimately likable body-switching family comedy. It does in fact involve a body switch with a family of four (plus a baby and a Frenchie for good measure). The parents are played by the seemingly nicest people in the world, Jennifer Garner and Ed Helms. It doesn’t really have an original bone in its body, but director McG, writers Victoria Strouse and Adam Sztykiel, and an enthusiastic cast prove that goodwill can sometimes go a long way. “Family Switch” may be more high-spirited than outright funny, but it’s warm-hearted without collapsing into Christmas tree sappiness. 

Loosely based on Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s 2010 children’s book “Bedtime for Mommy,” the film centers around the Walkers, an L.A. family who’s feeling a bit disconnected. Even with Christmas approaching, each one of them leads a busy life. Career-focused mother Jess (Garner) has to close an important deal with a pitch, so she can make partner at her architecture firm. Dad and school music teacher Bill (Helms) is also the footman of a band, “Dad or Alive,” that’s about to audition in front of a live TV broadcast. Their teenage kids, sporty CC (Emma Myers) and nerdy Wyatt (Brady Noon), have a soccer championship game and an early-college admission interview to Yale, respectively. Then there’s 2-year-old Miles (Lincoln and Theodore Sykes) and French bulldog Pickles, who both get to be held a lot. When Jess wants them all to make a happy family memory, they accompany Wyatt to a planetary alignment event at the Griffith Observatory, only for emotions to run high. Of course, all of them (except for those who can’t talk) say some version of “I wish you could be me.” 

Then Rita Moreno comes in, or rather a mystical astrology reader named Angelica, played by the lovely Moreno. Angelica’s whole raison d'être seems to be keeping families happy, as she stands by her van outside the observatory. Don’t bring too much logic into it, but when Angelica offers to take the family’s picture on the steps up to a giant telescope, this leads to a cosmic phenomenon (and a broken telescope). Voila! The Walkers each wake up in another family member’s body, having no choice but to go through the disastrous day of walking in a parent or child’s shoes. Predictable life lessons will be learned, but if they don’t fix the telescope that got them into this mess, they’ll be trapped in the wrong bodies until 2162 (the year of the next planetary alignment).

Sounds complicated, but “Family Switch” is pretty high-concept. A well-worn, tried-and-true premise like this apparently never runs out of style, and this one doesn’t even have the strangest or most unimaginative of body-swap fantasy plot devices (remember in “The Change-Up” when Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman pissed into a magic fountain?). As soon as the body-trading chaos gets underway, it’s pretty amusing watching Jennifer Garner, Ed Helms, Emma Myers ("Wednesday"), and Brady Noon ("Good Boys") play their counterparts in both comedically obvious and sly ways. It’s not much of a stretch for Garner to play an overprotective supermom, or the moms she played in both “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” and “Yes Day,” but she’s charming anyway and having a blast tapping back into Jenna Rink. Read the full review at GuyAtTheMovies.com

Grade: C +

Netflix released "Family Switch" (105 min.) to stream on November 30, 2023.