The Switch (Josh Gordon and Will Speck, 2010)

You know you’re in trouble when the ineffable charm and comic wares of Jason Bateman can’t rescue your film from coming off as an affront to mediocre romantic comedies, a sub-genre defined by its apologists (I know it’s schmaltzy, but, etc.), or the poster is by far the best thing about it.

Both are true of The Switch, a film whose contrivances are bested only by the level of boredom it manages to inspire in its audience. Apparently based on a short story, "Baster" by Jeffrey Eugenides, the film deposits us in New York seven years in the past, marked by the insane and impressive mass that is Jason Bateman's hair. Wally (Bateman) finds out best friend Kassie Larson (a blander-than-normal Jennifer Aniston) has decided to find a sperm donor and have a child. What better way to do this than have your kooky friend (Juliette Lewis) throw you a party where you artificially inseminate yourself, which, we're ensured, is what everybody's doing these days. Wally, who doesn't particularly like the donor—could it be because he's in love with Kassie?—gets really drunk and happens upon the donor's canister of semen in the bathroom. While fucking around with it, he accidentally spills it in the sink. Therefore, he must replace it with his own. Due to his state of extreme inebriation, he has no recollection of this occurrence.

Seven years later (the present day), the story picks up as Kassie, who had moved away, is moving back to New York with her fucking annoying son Sebastian (Thomas Robinson), who seems to have similar characteristics to a now more reasonably coiffed Wally. One of these similar qualities is the particular brand of hypochondria that befalls people only inasmuch as it indicates a character trait for the purpose of comparison rather than an actual condition. Someone like Sebastian exists only in the movies, coming off as an amalgam of that "special child" you've seen countless times (the character is even endowed with Jonathan Lipnicki character's penchant for using big words and spouting out weird facts in Jerry Maguire). But Sebastian's character quirks are so unlikely—he collects picture frames and keeps the generic pictures they come with and creates stories for each of them—you'll find yourself rolling your eyes when your not scratching your head.

That the characters relate to each other in ways that people don't relate to each other may be perplexing ("Hi, I'm out of town with this dude I like right now, and I really don't want to have to come back there, but I just found out my son has lice. Can you do me a favor and go pick him up and perform a rigorous regimen of rituals to see if you can get rid of them? Thanks. And when I come back, and you've taken care of my son for me, and scrubbed his head and laundered his sheets, and gone through his hair with a fine-toothed comb, I might yell at you for not being happy for me and my new boyfriend," says the heroine of the film), but the film's real downfall is the laziness inherent in Allan Loeb's screenplay. It seems defiant in its tendency to string together elements we've seen before in other movies, but without any meaning behind them. Bateman's voiceover, offering the coda to the film displays this perfectly, as he declares "Maybe the human race isn't a race at all," possibly hinting at slowing down and enjoying life? Who knows, because this sentiment is completely independent of anything that happens in the fucking movie.

Only Jeff Goldblum, who manages to wring one or two laughs from the hackneyed material, seems like he's having any fun here; on the sinking ship, where everybody's running around waving their arms and panicking, he's sitting back and getting drunk, because, Why not? We're all going to die anyway.

Thoroughly improbable, utterly unfunny, and sometimes even mean-spirited (the film seems to have something against homeless people, offering at least two shameful throwaway jokes at their expense), The Switch foolishly relies on the knowledge of its audience to make inferences from and draw comparisons to other, better movies it's already seen and apologized for, even while recommending.

Friday the 13th (Marcus Nispel, 2009)

You can be forgiven for not knowing that the depraved serial killer Jason Voorhees appeared only peripherally as a deformed young boy in the original Friday the 13th (1980). But fans of the series know that Jason's mother was responsible for the slaughter of the now-standard cabal of generic, sex-crazed teenagers in the original—the entirety of which is summed up in the first few minutes of this version—so this is more an update than it is a remake. The whole thing feels a little paint-by-numbers and designed by committee; you get the feeling that everyone here is unified in their ideology of performing a job-for-hire, strictly because there’s money to be made, the only thing at stake being performing dutifully enough to ensure future employment. But there’s one great moment of invention in Friday the 13th's screenplay when, about 20 minutes in, after Jason has dispatched with what the viewer can be forgiven for thinking is the group whose journey we will follow through to the film’s conclusion, the title is introduced, revealing the preceding sequence to be a foreword. Not only is it impressive in its concept but also in its resourcefulness: by having two groups of teenagers to kill, there’s less time needed for plot development. Which is presumably a good thing, depending on whether your tolerance is higher for watching teens get stalked and mutilated by a madman than it is for excusing flimsy plot construction.

Though screenwriters Damien Shannon and Mark Swift offer a modest improvement over their screenplay for the D.O.A. Freddy vs. Jason—I liked that there were little homages to fans of (or at least those familiar with) the original series, such as Jason wearing as he did in Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) a pillow case (or burlap sack, whatever) over his head before finding, as he did in Friday the 13th Part 3 (1982), the hockey mask that would make him (and it) an icon—none of it is scary. Part of this is because all of the sets look constructed, Jason looks and moves like a stuntman, and the score is lousy. The multi-ethnic cast (the presence of which begs the question Is it progressive to allow blacks and Asians to be brutally murdered alongside their white peers? and, strangely, I think it may be) comprises a series of "types," the white kids included. (The most ridiculous and perplexing being the guy obviously meant to look like the screen persona of Seth Rogen, though with none of his awkward charisma or self-effacing sense of humor.)

The Friday the 13th movies have always seemed oddly puritanical and conservative in their values (smoke pot and fuck, you die) given their penchant for employing inventive forms of brutality. This notion is only complicated when you find yourself siding with the killer (a surrogate for imposing these values) due to the brash, obnoxious behavior of the callous teenagers. While it may indeed be brisker (and arguably better) than any of the films of the original series, it’s still pretty thin. And at 97 minutes, it feels way too long. Fairly generic and offering a bit of restraint, given the post-Saw world we live in, it's best not to expect much here, because that’s precisely what you’ll get.