REVIEWED - 13 GOING ON 30: Yet another body-swapping fantasy works for Michael Dwyer, thanks to Jennifer Garner's star-making performance

It's not unusual for film-makers to come up with the same ideas for movies around the same time. In recent years there were rival projects on Robin Hood, Michael Collins and Alexander the Great, for example, and in 1988 three different companies produced body-swapping movies. Two of those (Vice Versa and 18 Again) fell by the wayside, but the other, Big, was a huge hit and earned Tom Hanks his first Oscar nomination for his subtle portrayal of a 13-year-old boy who wakes up in the body of an adult.

As the title suggests, 13 Going on 30 treads similar narrative territory, although here the protagonist is given a sex change and plunged into a different era.

Opening in 1987, it introduces Jenna Rink (Christa B. Allen) as a gauche, shy schoolgirl browbeaten by more confident students, who are depicted as a milder variation on their counterparts in the recent Mean Girls.

When everything goes wrong at her 13th birthday party, Jenna wishes she were grown up. The next day, she wakes up in 2004, now a glamorous and sophisticated 30-year-old editor (Jennifer Garner) at the glossy style magazine Poise. Having sidestepped all those messy teen years, she is now living in a smart Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan, where she is startled to see a handsome, naked man emerge from her bathroom - her sports-star boyfriend.

Phased and confused by her new circumstances, Jenna struggles to get to grips with all the complicated details and responsibilities of her adult life, and with her own transformation into a calculatingly competitive and self-obsessed operator. And Matt, the loyal, overweight friend she shunned in her youth, has grown into a handsome, successful photographer (Mark Ruffalo) who is about to marry another woman.

A dose of moralising lurks inevitably in the last reel, and the logic of the plotline crumbles under close inspection, but this is, after all, a fantasy and it's permeated with an infectious sense of fun, most entertainingly in its playful treatment of Jenna's dilemma that her cultural references are firmly rooted in the mid-1980s.

Building on the promise evident from his low-budget Tadpole, director Gary Winick propels the consequences with wit, flair and pace. Best of all is the effervescent pivotal performance by Garner, from the TV series Alias, who lights up the screen with radiant star quality.