Like Father Like Son Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.0

Like Father Like Son Blu-ray Movie Review

Thank you, Sony.

Sony has released the 1987 Dudley Moore/Kirk Cameron body swapping Comedy 'Like Father Like Son' to Blu-ray. The film was previously released to Blu-ray only months ago by Mill Creek with what was one of the worst looking transfers in the format's history. Sony has rectified the problem with a much more filmic and faithful 1080p image. As with the Mill Creek disc, this Sony presentation contains a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 lossless soundtrack and no extras. But it's worth the upgrade for the very good picture quality.

Like Father Like Son Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

To be blunt, Mill Creek's Like Father Like Son Blu-ray was a disgrace. The "1" score was generous. It's truly one of the most disastrous and disgraceful Blu-ray transfers in the now long history of the format. It was a mess in every way, wrong and wayward in every single area of presentation standard. For those who wish to view the carnage, here's a link to the review and here's a direct link to the screenshots. Yikes.

Fortunately, Sony has done fans a solid by re-releasing the film to Blu-ray only six months later and the image is wholly transformed. For starters, it's now framed at 1.85:1 rather than at 1.78:1. Gone is the soft, compression riddled, poorly textured, flatly colored, and generally garbled visual mess and replaced by a genuinely good, honest-to-goodness real Blu-ray image. The picture is, here, pleasantly filmic and lightly grainy rather than horridly compressed and littered with chunky compression artifacts. Grain is fine and flattering, very pleasing to the eye and accurate to the source. Textures are intact rather than scrubbed and flattened out of existence, appearing handsomely firm and crisp in most every shot. Granted a few inherently softer shots linger throughout but the vast, vast majority looks borderline perfect. Complex facial and clothing details are the norm. Richly realized environments -- hospital rooms and corridors, school hallways and classrooms, and the various parts of the Hammond home come alive with clear, reliable clarity and definition suiting both the film format broadly and the Blu-ray format generally. Colors are full and satisfying rather than flat and ugly as before. While this is not the most dizzying, dazzling, vivid, robust color presentation on the market, the health and essential tonal accuracy and vitality leave the Mill Creek disc looking even more sad. Black levels are reliable and pleasantly deep and true, whites (like the opening titles) are more vivid and crisp, and skin tones are well rounded. The most discerning viewer may still spot the odd compression issue and fleeting source flaw but to call this anything less than a perfectly good and healthy Blu-ray image would be to critically undersell this. Well done, Sony, and thank you for giving fans a proper Blu-ray of this classic 80s favorite.

Like Father Like Son Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Sony brings Like Father Like Son to Blu-ray with a soundtrack encoded in the DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 lossless configuration. That's the same as found on the Mill Creek disc, but this track offers a cleaner, fuller, more robust sound presentation. While still constrained to the same spatial limitations the sense of fuller engagement and clarity are both vastly superior to the Mill Creek issue. The track finds life in all elements, not just getting by as it did on the Mill Creek disc but offering far more expressive music, more detailed dialogue, and more lifelike and finely integrated support audio cues. Music stretches the front left and right limits for raw range and, just as critical, presents various examples of music, from score to Rock songs, with impressive depth and clarity. Ambient supports are on-point and while limited to the front side there's a very welcoming, engaging, nearly immersive feel to the track. Dialogue settles into a finely imaged front-center area of operation. It is clear and lifelike from beginning to end.

Like Father Like Son Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Like the Mill Creek disc before it, Sony's release of Like Father Like Son contains no supplemental content. There is no "top menu" screen; the film simply begins playback upon disc insertion. Pressing the "top menu" remote button restarts the film. There is a crude in-film pop-up menu which allows users to toggle the optional subtitles on and off. No DVD or digital copies are included with purchase. This release does not ship with a slipcover.

Like Father Like Son Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Like Father Like Son is a fun movie and one of the best of the "body swap" films that has become something of a subgenre all its own. Moore is terrific, Cameron isn't bad, and the film holds up for laughs and mild family drama all these decades later. Kudos to Sony for rescuing the film and providing disappointed fans a genuinely good A/V presentation. The downside is the absence of supplemental content. It's also a shame that fans need to double-dip, but at least they can now enjoy the film in a much more watchable, organic, accurate, and acceptable presentation. Sony, how about saving The Freshman next?