Prismark10
In the late 1980s there were several body swap teen comedies that emerged in a short space of time. Tom Hanks in Big was the big one and the others were judged against it.Like Father Like Son is a likable comedy but drastically lacks a plot, wastes some of its actors and seems to be a series of sketches.Kirk Cameron plays a high school teenager who with the aid of a Native Indian portion mixes his mind with his brilliant surgeon father, Dudley Moore.Now its Moore who acts as the kid and Cameron goes to school with his adult know how which irritates the other students and his best friend, Sean Astin.They both have to get used to their new bodies, Moore has to navigate a promotion but upsets his hospital boss by siding with a colleague to offer medicine to those without insurance and fooling around with his wife.Moore is in his element when he is having fun as a teenager and Cameron is very good as the more uptight one after the body swap, maybe he was just being himself!Patrick O'Neal and Catherine Hicks are rather wasted in this very 1980s comedy. Its sporadically funny and mildly enjoyable.
bkoganbing
Like Father Like Son was made at the height of Kirk Cameron's bubblegum popularity as teen idol, courtesy of his television series Growing Pains which was dominating the ratings in 1987. Cameron was just getting into his fundamentalist religion kick so the script couldn't be too naughty.As it is it's a mildly amusing comedy of the Freaky Friday vein, only this time it's a father and son, Kirk's father in this case being Dudley Moore. Kirk's your typical teenage kid, just looking for a good time and not too serious. Moore is a very serious and respected surgeon who would like to be the new chief of staff at his hospital to replace Patrick O'Neal's whose recommendation on a replacement will probably make or break a candidate.Kirk's got some troubles of his own in the form of shapely Camille Cooper who's hitting on him. She's the girl friend of jock Micah Grant who hates Kirk and his friend Sean Astin.In fact Astin's archaeologist uncle is the cause of all the problems that Moore and Cameron face. The uncle Bill Morrison has come back from a dig at the Navajo reservation with a body transference medicine that Astin thinks would be worth a few laughs, even experimenting with a dog and cat on it. But when the maid thinks it's a condiment and Moore and Cameron use it on the spaghetti, strange things happen. Each lives about 36 hours in the other's bodies and the other's lives and generally make a mess of it. If you've seen both versions of Freaky Friday you've got a general idea of what's going to happen.The film did reasonably well at the box office though it failed to make Cameron a movie star. That didn't happen until Kirk started playing on the Christian film circuit. Moore and Cameron and Astin work well together and it's still mildly amusing.
15231
Someone must have thought that all this movie needed to succeed was Kirk Cameron to pull in the teenage girls and Dudley Moore to pull in their parents. Somehow they forgot that Kirk is incapable of pulling off anything in the way of depth in his acting and Dudley in a role like this would get carried away with its silliness. The premise was old, the dialogue poor, the situations strained, and the acting cartoonish. The result is a bad movie with a fading teen heartthrob and a fifty-something actor playing his Arthur character at the age of ten. If anyone finds this in a 'sale' bin for used videos, try to bury it farther down where it can be avoided and forgotten.
imaginativemail
Upon watching this film in the TBS Sunday movie context, dully and without vision for the 27th time, as if by exquisite divine intervention, it came to me. This movie is quite brilliant in its stupidity. Let's look at the average B 8o's switcheroo flick as if it were a slice of swiss cheese - the holes are meant to be there. It wouldn't be the cheese without it. One may not look any further than the montage of running sneakers and joyous looks of dumb amazement coming down the stairs at you to realize that what we have here is a little slice of heaven. I also particularly like the fact that the Chief of Staff's middle-aged wife is trolling around the singles bars on Sunset Blvd by herself on a random week night - where she just happens upon Dr. Hammond and his son's friend, Trigger (as in hung like). The fact that said bar seems to consist solely of single, attractive women doesn't strike anyone odd? The brilliance here is less subdued - this is obviously how Chris Hammond SEES the bar through his inexperienced, sheltered eyes. This is yet another scene where we get to see Dudley Moore dumbfounded and looking agog. As he surveys the scene, the camera again treats us with super-fast editing so that we can see his expression not once, but several times. I could wax on and on about the adventures of the Hammond's however, I often frighten myself.
AD
