REVIEW: The Switch

PARENT TRAP

What's with Hollywood sex symbols (Jennifer Aniston was recently voted most eligible in some random online poll) and their desperate desire for mommydom. Recently, Jennifer Lopez opted for IVF in The Back Up Plan and now Aniston follows in The Switch. Hollywood actually expects us to believe these women can't find suitable men? Tsk!

And what's with this platonic 'best friends' tripe? In this Kassie and Wally (Jason Batemen) are obviously made for each other, but don't realise it till years later. Kassie opts for toothy jock (Patrick Wilson) as the sperm donor, and years later returns to New York to arrange a daddy for her neurotic kid Sebastian (Thomas Robinson) This cute but nutty six-year-old is actually an advertisement on why not to have kids if you are to be a single parent. He has bad skin, lice in his hair and every quirk known to humankind, the least of which is collecting photo frames with other people's pictures and imagining a family.

Between one thing and another, Wally realises that Sebastian is his son, because he had, in a drunken state, switched the sample with his own. On this dubious premise this film is based. Then it depends on a kid lisping wise words and it is just not funny. Aniston doesn't even lend this film (of which she is one of the producers) her usual sartorial flair, and just looks sullen and pinched throughout, leaving it to Bateman to salvage this irredeemable movie-- he tries and tries and fails.

It took two directors to cook this glop, and unforgivably, to reduce Jeff Goldblum and Juliette Lewis to props.