Family Switch is the Human Centipede 2 of body swap movies. Instead of a daughter and mother switching, we get a total of three swaps within one family… it’s a body swap movie only with more body swapping than usual. Does that make it better? Well, it doesn’t make it worse.

The flick stars Jennifer Garner’s latest film family: Ed Helms, Emma Myers, Brady Noon, a toddler, and a pug. They all swap bodies due to an alignment of planets and a broken telescope at Griffith Observatory (because that’s a detail that matters).

So Garner’s business woman gets swapped with Myers’ soccer playing teen, Helm’s ex-rocker goofball husband swaps with Mensa nerd Noon, and the toddler and pug swap too. Because one body swap in a movie is so last five decades.

The flick is derivative and it knows it, spending an amusing moment confirming this has never once happened before ever before name dropping a half dozen body swap movies. It’s cute… just like most of the movie is harmlessly cute.

All the usual lessons are learned between adult and teen that you’d expect from this subgenre of movie. Mix in some hand-waving Christmas theming, and you have an even healthier dose of sentimental sap. Not bad sentimental sap… the actors are all putting in the work and trying very hard (even if the adults have the usual problem of over-acting their kid-in-an-adult-body schtick).

Sometimes I wanted to rate the movie higher and then it’d just go for a lot of average comedy or sentimentality. It’s a fine version of one of these movies but never goes the extra mile to be great. It amused me though and that was enough.

Score: 79