It's a Boy Girl Thing (2006)

It's a Boy Girl Thing arrives from 2006, a year when the body-swap comedy was already a well-worn vintage, and it does little to improve the terroir. Two suburban teenagers, the bookish Nell and the jock Woody, argue before an Aztec statue of Tezcatlipoca and wake up wearing each other. The ensuing menu is familiar: locker-room panic, a bikini wax, a slumber party, a football game won in the final seconds. The film was shot in Toronto while pretending to be American, which is itself a kind of body swap, and it carries the fingerprints of its producers, Elton John among them, without ever quite justifying their investment.

The picture's mildest progressive gesture is structural. Nell is a girl who reads literature, sits for a Yale interview, and ultimately scores the winning touchdown while inhabiting a boy's body, which briefly suggests that competence is not gendered. That suggestion is then dissolved by the closing reel, where the couple confess their love, Nell defers Yale for a sabbatical, and the arrangement settles into the standard romantic resolution. A film can gesture at role inversion without making an argument, and this one gestures and then puts its hand down.

Elsewhere the cellar is bare. Race is never mentioned, the cast is uniformly white, and the lone supporting player of color exists without comment. There is no LGBTQ presence, no environmental concern, no economic critique beyond a single line about Nell's mother finding Woody's family uneducated. The body humor is of the traditional teen-comedy sort, aimed at embarrassment, not affirmation. The premise about walking in another's shoes carries a faint moral, but the film is too light on its feet to lecture anyone. A pleasant enough vintage, best served cold, and unlikely to be cellared.