Swapped Review: A Blisteringly Basic and Hollow Shell of Missed Potential

Swapped is the kind of movie that’s often the hardest to write a review for. A film that is exceptionally great or truly awful will always leave you with something to talk about. Whether it worked or not, there’s something notable about it that can lead to deeper analysis and understanding. But when a film is this aggressively mediocre, it can be difficult to determine how to talk about it because it feels like there’s nothing of substance to talk about. But this is my job, so we press on anyways.

Coming to us from Skydance Animation, better known as the studio run by disgraced former Pixar head John Lasseter following his ousting from that company, Swapped clearly wants to reach the heights of Pixar, Disney, or DreamWorks’ best without actually understanding what made those films truly connect with people. The end result is a movie with good ideas made by hard-working, well-intentioned artists that ultimately still falls flat on its face and never figures out how to get up.

What is Swapped about?

In an animal-inhabited world known as The Valley, our story begins as Ollie, a gopher-like creature called a Pookoo voiced by Michael B. Jordan, struggles to find food for his community amidst colorful birds called Javans poaching their crops. After a chance encounter with a Javan named Ivy, voiced by Juno Temple, Ollie finds himself magically transformed into a Javan, with Ivy soon finding herself transformed into a Pookoo. Now, the unlikely duo must work together to restore themselves to their original forms and get back home, all while learning to see the world from a new perspective along the way.

Swapped Review

So, on its face, this is not a bad setup. Teaching empathy via body swap is a tried-and-true storytelling trope that can be very effective when done well. The problem is that Swapped immediately shoots itself in the foot by having its swap mechanics work in such a way that they negate the typical storytelling opportunities of the body swap genre. Ollie and Ivy never have to directly experience each other’s lives because they don’t actually become each other. They just become members of each other’s species.

As such, neither the characters nor the audience are able to directly learn about who these characters are through them living each other’s respective experiences. Instead, they simply teach other how to use their species’ respective physical abilities while leaving who they are as specific individuals to be told rather than shown either by themselves or other characters. It makes the emotional journey ring hollow when the characters have to say that they’ve reached a particular point in their character arcs instead of letting us see them reach that point through their actions.

And whenever the film does try to genuinely show the journey, it does so almost exclusively through a series of visually impressive but cloying montages set to swelling music that all desperately want to be the first 10 minutes of Up or Hiccup and Toothless’ first flight from How To Train Your Dragon or any number of scenes from other, better movies. The key difference being that I cared about the characters involved in those other sequences from those other movies because the filmmakers behind them showed me why I should care about them, while Swapped doesn’t.

Simply put, the emotional beats don’t work, but at least there’s some well-meaning ideas behind them. The comedy on the other hand is just plain bad. Whenever the film is attempting to be funny, it defaults to one of three scenarios: characters acting like idiots for no good reason, characters arguing for no good reason, or dung references repeated ad nauseum. Our three leads, Michael B. Jordan, Juno Temple, and Tracy Morgan, are all extremely talented and have been very funny in other projects, but their natural charisma can only go so far when the script gives them nothing to work with.

But perhaps its biggest problem is that, for how much the movie clearly wants you to think about how seeing things from a different perspective can apply to the real world, it feels bizarrely disconnected from reality and not in the fun way. The world is populated by made-up animals who eat made-up food, but none of it is fantastical enough to be compelling by itself with two major exceptions. The wolves and deer both have trees growing out of them, which is a unique and just fun visual, and within the surprisingly elaborate backstory, we have walking tree groves called Dzo which are a legitimately cool idea.

But every other animal is just a proxy of a real-world animal but with a weird fantasy name and occasionally a different color scheme than usual and I must ask to what end? If you’re not going to get creative and give Pookoos and Javans any unique or fantastical attributes that make them different from regular gophers and birds, why not just make them gophers and birds? As it stands, all that’s really accomplished is making the characters next to impossible to latch onto either in terms of relatability or cool factor.

Is Swapped worth watching?

Swapped is lucky that its quick pacing, strong visuals, and handful of good storytelling ideas keep it as just a bad film as opposed to a completely insufferable one. The people involved clearly tried to make this work and I think there’s a solid movie in here somewhere. But its buried under terrible jokes, clunky exposition, and emotional sensibilities ripped off almost entirely from other movies to the point where you can feel when its settling for being a bad version of The Lion King or Finding Nemo instead of striving to be a good version of itself.

Swapped is now streaming on Netflix.

Swapped Review: A Blisteringly Basic and Hollow Shell of Missed Potential