Chris Hammond (Kirk Cameron) struggles in class. He has a crush on self- obsessed Lori Beaumont despite her giant boyfriend. His best friend Trigger (Sean Astin)'s uncle Earl is working on a brain transference serum derived from a native American potion. Chris and his father Dr. Jack Hammond (Dudley Moore) accidentally take it and switch bodies. Jack is a head hospital surgeon. Dr. Amy Larkin (Catherine Hicks) is a crusader working under him. His boss Dr. Larry Armbruster has flirtatious wife Ginnie (Margaret Colin). Father and son have to live with the switch until they can find uncle Earl.The characters are not that appealing and the story has nothing new. It's all rather bland and unlikeable. Chris is not nice and his taste is rather superficial in all aspects. Trigger is even worst. They should have gone all out as wild crazy guys although I doubt Cameron is capable. Jack is not much better and borders on boring. Switching from one unappealing character to the other does nothing to make it good. It definitely does not make it funny. The father letting the son work at the hospital amounts to callous malpractice. It's bad mindless writing. This is actually anti-funny.

Like Father, Like Son is probably most appealing to 80s fans, presenting typical teen genre conflicts as well as 80s teen stars, Kirk Cameron and Sean Astin. Young kids might appreciate it simply for the story (despite it's lack of novelty) of a teenager getting all the priveleges of being an adult, while only having to change appearance and not attitude. The decade however, offering a nauseating selection of role switching comedies and parodies, may have the rest of us looking to avoid this repetition and searching for something else on the shelves. Chris Hammond (Kirk Cameron) is a high school senior. He's an average student, a decent track team participant, and likes a girl at school who happens to be dating a psychotic jock bully. And, his dad, Jack (Dudley Moore) is breathing down his neck to get him an ivy league school to study pre-med, leaving Chris secretly wanting to tell his dad to just let him make his own decisions about what he wants to do.Chris's buddy, Trigger (Sean Astin), has a wacky uncle who's staying with him. He lived in the desert for awhile, experimenting with body-switching potions. Trigger gets a hold of the brain transference serum and it switches Chris and Jack's brains so that Chris is Jack and Jack is Chris. There's a mistake here, in that their accents should've switched as well, since when Trigger tried it on the cat and dog, the cat barked at the dog and the dog meowed at the cat. But, it makes for a whole lot of trouble. The incredibly boring and sometimes big-shot Dr. Hammond has to settle on being a teenager awhile. And Chris has to settle for being Dr. Hammond, both without screwing things up. For Dr. Hammond, he hopes to get the ordeal with over quickly; but for Chris, there's advantages to not having to show up for school, take tests, and the like. But, they each grow quite irritable of the situation as they tend to screw up each other's lives. Dr. Hammond has a few nasty run-ins with the bully as Chris. And Chris, involved in an affair with the boss's wife, not only sets the living room on fire, but also risks his father's chances of becoming chief of staff. I still think it's a fun movie for kids and probably teenagers. Safe family fun for the most part anyways due to lack of sex, violence, and for the most part, language. However, Kirk Cameron did tend to get quite annoying at parts as the whiny teenager. Actually, Trigger was one of the best characters in the movie as a sort of slacker friend of Chris, except he's not in the movie all that much. I did like Chris as Dr. Hammond during the hospital scenes, when he had to take his med students on rounds, and didn't know what the heck he was doing. It has it's moments.

Well, if you've got an Sunday afternoon with nothing else to do, this is the movie for you. It's neither intellictually stimulating, nor is it hilariously funny, but it's one of those guilty pleasure movies. You don't know why you watch it, because you've already seen it before and it wasn't that hot of a movie, but you can't help but sit and watch it until the credits roll. It is neither the best nor the worst parent/child switching places movie ever.

I could fill pages on why this film is such a pathetic attempt at the "kid/parent" switch comedies of the 80's but let me just give you a quick summary.This film completely fails to portray how people put into this situation would behave. The best (worst) example of this is the scene when Dudley Moore, playing an 18 year old in a 40 something body, is staying at home alone. He's supposed to be a senior in High School and yet when left at home for 5 minutes he behaves like a 6 year old....playing loud music and jumping on the furniture. Obviously the director just couldn't resist having Dudley Moore jump around like an idiot for a few minutes.Had the writer and director spent 30 seconds thinking about how people might really try to act in this situation it might have been entertaining...but then again this movie was made about 5 times in the space of 18 months in the late 80's anyway so I think the best idea would have been to get an original idea and not waste everybody's time.