Dame Tu Cuerpo

(Gimme Your Body)

Nobody was really asking for another body-switch movie. Not even when Freaky Friday came out. But that movie was surprisingly amusing. Dame Tu Cuerpo is not. This is a Spanish bawdy take on the genre, and it is anything but amusing. It is exhausting, tiresome, and annoying. This time, instead of a man switching with a man, or a woman switching with a woman, a man switches with a woman. There plenty of interesting possibilities, and to his credit, screenwriter Enrique Renteria (Todo El Poder, Dark Cities) does try to take the film in an interesting position, but then backtracks by adding all sorts of stupid toilet humor. Keep in mind that Renteria wrote Todo El Poder, a truly lame movie.

Dame Tu Cuerpo is a comedy, and director Rafael Montero (Broken Hearts, Embrujo de Rock) paints his characters in very broad strokes. Alex (Rafael Sanchez Navarro, Broken Hearts, About the Living) is a typical manly man. He coaches a football team in Mexico (yes, football, not soccer). He loves to drink and bed women, and this embarrasses his friend German (Pedro Alvarez Tostado). German's fiancee Jackie (Luz Maria Zentina) detests him. She is a designer, which means there are plenty of models around her workplace. Alex likes to visit and hit on the women. German wants his best friend and fiancee to get along, so one night he makes a wish that they truly understand each other.

Guess what? Alex and Jackie wake up the next morning and discover that they've switched bodies. It takes them a while to figure out what's going, and even longer to convince a disbelieving German. The lame thing about the switch is that Montero overplays the gender roles. Alex and Jackie as the opposite gender act nothing like they did before. Instead, they act like bumbling oafs in an attempt to generate laughs. Jackie (now Navarro) worries about his looks. The old Alex was a slob. Now, he has to do his hair, wear a scarf, and act like a priss. Navarro goes all out in his performance, but it looks more like bad attempts to do gay stereotypes than a woman in a man's body. Likewise for Zentina. Both do a decent job of acting, but the script undermines them. Jackie goes from a normal, well-dressed woman to a lecherous slob, eager to feel up her models. She dresses in baggy clothes and does her hair in a simple ponytail. Zentina walks with a swagger in an attempt to "look" like a man. The script balks at going further, which is a shame. They set up Alex as almost a perv, yet he only gets a few minutes of thrills with his new set of breasts.

Then, Dame Tu Cuerpo does an about face in the character of German. German loves Jackie, but now Jackie is inside Alex. How far will his love go? And whom does he truly love? Is it the body or the soul? If it is the body, does that make German gay? Montero and Renteria ask some pretty existential questions, hastened by German's impending wedding. This also means that Jackie and Alex get to go to the engagement dinner as the other person in an attempt to get more laughs. All these sophomoric antics clash with German's inward struggle to determine whether he should marry Jackie in Alex's body. It all leads to a bizarre and arbitrary ending that is on the whole, mostly unsatisfying.

Mongoose Rates It: Pretty Bad.
1 hour, 33 minutes, Spanish with English subtitles, Not Rated but contains language and

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