A movie that was featured multiple times on TV while I was growing up, and although I never got a chance to watch it back then, the title's been floating around in my subconscious since then. After about 20 years I have come around to watch it, which I guess is a quick turnaround for me, but I digress. The movie itself presents an interesting premise, through a series of mishaps featuring a magical artefact stolen from a Buddhist temple, father and son gets switched around, and "son" needs to hold it up in 5th grade while "dad" goes off to work. So far so standard, if you've seen any other body swap-movie before, it's pretty obvious where the plot goes after that. What keeps this movie going is the at least somewhat passable humour of the expected awkwardness when people are thrown into the deep end and need to pretend like everything's okay. There's enough charm and warmth to keep it going, and had me laughing at least a few times. I do think Reinhold kind of overplays the awkwardness of his son, however that could also be interpreted as the character still reeling from the shock of suddenly having to pretend to be an adult and not knowing what's actually expected of him. Fred Savage does quite an impressive impersonation of his father character, showing that young children really do understand more than one might think.
While my ultimate goal with a review is to reveal as little as possible of the story to avoid spoilers, I feel I must draw attention to what is possibly the most peculiar section of a department store I've ever seen, featuring James Bond-level spy-gadgets, something that caught me completely off-guard and got me wondering what kind of movie this really is. Considering it already features said magical artefact, I guess it's not too much of a stretch to include improbably gadgetry.
All in all a fairly enjoyable watch, but sadly I feel it's ultimately forgettable, and at least for a modern audience that has seen other body swap-movies already, it's more of a curiosity that's been copied and done over again at least a few times by now. There's nothing wrong with it in that regard, but if it came down to rewatching this or 'Freaky Friday', I'd probably go with the latter simply because of the one song in the soundtrack that movie is most famous for.
While my ultimate goal with a review is to reveal as little as possible of the story to avoid spoilers, I feel I must draw attention to what is possibly the most peculiar section of a department store I've ever seen, featuring James Bond-level spy-gadgets, something that caught me completely off-guard and got me wondering what kind of movie this really is. Considering it already features said magical artefact, I guess it's not too much of a stretch to include improbably gadgetry.
All in all a fairly enjoyable watch, but sadly I feel it's ultimately forgettable, and at least for a modern audience that has seen other body swap-movies already, it's more of a curiosity that's been copied and done over again at least a few times by now. There's nothing wrong with it in that regard, but if it came down to rewatching this or 'Freaky Friday', I'd probably go with the latter simply because of the one song in the soundtrack that movie is most famous for.