By Jae-Ha Kim
Amazon.com
June 27, 2008
A body-swapping comedy, It’s a Boy Girl Thing takes a look at what happens when contentious next door neighbors have to literally live in each other’s body for a while.
Nell (Samaire Armstrong, Entourage, Dirty Sexy Money) is a studious geek. Woody (Kevin Zegers, Transamerica) is the high school football hero. Though they’ve known each other their entire lives, the two are happiest pretending the other doesn’t exist.
Psychoanalysis might conclude that it’s because each has aspects that they are trying to subliminate in themselves, but in this farce, which executive-produced by Elton John, the plot is much less deep.
It’s a Boy Girl Thing has more in common with Rob Schneider’s crude body-switch-’em-up The Hot Chick than, say, Tom Hanks’ Big (where his character didn’t change sexes, but did grow from a little boy to a grown man overnight).
At its best, the film offers a few laughs and some sight gags.
At its worst, the characters utter lines such as, “I’m a loser, I’m trouble and I’m stupid. It’s basic genetics.”
Written by Geoff Deane, who fared much better with the clever Kinky Boots, It’s a Boy Girl Thing capitalizes on the strength of the lead actors. While Armstrong and Zegers look like they could be old enough to be paying off their student loans, they have the mannerisms and nuances of teenagers down pat.
Once they swap bodies and have to work together to get their lives back, they also exhibit wonderful chemistry. So nice, in fact, that for a nanosecond, you almost wish they would never get their old lives back.
