Switching lives with someone sounds like a dream sometimes, especially when that someone seems to have more of everything than you do and a perfect existence that doesn’t seem to take anything to maintain. But then in the movies you find out that those supposedly perfect people do in fact have something that’s wrong with their lives, they’re just very good at hiding it. Heather Cichowski from The Whisp is right when she says that body swap movies have been done before, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t funny when we see them in multiple themes. A lot of times though it’s simply that two people think that they have the better understanding of what life is all about and don’t realize just what the other person goes through on a daily basis. It’s enough to make a person appreciate their place in life a lot more and understand that no one’s perfect.
Here are five of the best body-switching movies of all time.
5. The Skeleton Key
Cynthia Fuchs of Common Sense Media gives a pretty good idea of what this movie is all about since in all honesty it is more about the jump scares and inherent terror associated with the use of dark magic that gets people. The movie takes a while to build and you don’t even get the idea that it’s all about body-swapping until near the end of the movie when you find out that the two antagonists that are spoken of at one point in the movie have been doing the body swap for quite some time. In fact the thing that makes them even worse is that they transferred their souls into children to start with, which makes it even more diabolical.
4. Freaky Friday
This is a remake of an older movie and the only reason I decided to put it in aside from the original is that more people can likely recognize and relate to the actors in the remake. When a mother and daughter disagree over so many different things in their lives and think that neither of them could handle living as the other does they get a rude awakening when they somehow switch bodies and have to learn how to navigate each other’s lives. Needless to say there’s a lot that both of them have to learn about one another in order to fully coexist and come to an understanding that will bring them closer together.
3. Like Father Like Son
The ante is upped just a bit in this one as it features a father who is a head doctor at his hospital. This dynamic only gets funnier but also more dire since the son, who is now in the body of the father, has no idea what he’s doing when it comes to medicine and the father is about as uptight as anyone could be and is desperately seeking a way to reverse the change to get his life back. This seems to be a popular theme, switching parents and their kids, largely because it is true that parents and their children don’t seem to understand each other at some point in their lives, which is funny since the parents have already gone through what the kids are experiencing.
2. Vice Versa
You can definitely see potential for mayhem when a son that has yet to really experience life switches places with his already successful father and has to hope and pray that the son, now in the father’s body, won’t screw things up too badly. Then there’s the father in the son’s body that is already worrying about going through puberty and having to deal with his ex-wife that has no idea what’s going on since she sees him as her son. Yeah, that’d be a bit awkward considering that an ex is usually an ex for a reason. But it’d be worse since you couldn’t tell anyone without being labeled insane.
1. The Change-Up
This one thankfully gets away from the whole idea of parent and kid theme and goes off on a best friend idea that has two good buddies peeing in the same fountain one night after spending the evening reminiscing and hanging out. When they wake up they’ve switched bodies, and both of them have to find out just how the other really lives. For one the idea of having a wife and kids is horrifying at first since he’s been single for so long, and for the other it’s a return to the single life and the uncertainty of knowing just where that life is really going. It’s not exactly easy to be single again after being married with kids, as many divorced parents could attest to.
The whole ‘grass is greener’ line is great when you think that someone else has it better than you. But when you look over the fence you might find out that it’s all a matter of perception, not reality.
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