Film Review: Freakier Friday

Freakier Friday
Director: Nisha Ganatra
Walt Disney Picture, Gunn Films and Burr! Productions
In Theaters: 08.08.25

The question of why we’re getting so many nostalgia based sequels decades after the glory days of the original, and who exactly they appeal to so much, is one that is often posed to me, and it’s a fair question. The audiences that grew up on these movies are rarely in the key demographic, younger audiences aren’t particularly drawn to them, and it’s endlessly cool to bash them. The fact remains that Jurassic World Rebirth made a godzillion dollars at the international box office, and The Naked Gun is doing solid business given its budget. The latest of these films, Freakier Friday, nicely answers the question of whether these movies are for older audiences or their children with one of the clearest examples in some time: they are movies for parents to drag their kids to see.

Freakier Friday picks up 22 years after the events of the 2003 remake of the 1976 original. Anna Coleman (Lindsay Lohan, The Parent Trap) is a music producer and single mother to teenage Harper (Julia Butters, The Gray Man, The Fabelmans), with help from her therapist, podcaster, and author mother, Tess (Jamie Lee Curtis, Everything Everywhere All At Once). Harper clashes with new classmate Lily (Sophia Hammons, Under Wraps, Up Here), daughter of British immigrant Eric (Manny Jacinto, who is perhaps known as the villainous Kylo Stimpy in Star Wars: The Acolyte). When Anna and Eric fall in love and get engaged, they decide to move the family to London, which horrifies beach girl Harper, and while Lily wants to leave America behind (I can relate), she’s none too keen on the idea of being forced into being part of this new dynamic. When Harper begs to stay in Los Angeles with Tess, it creates further tension between Mom and Grams. Things take an odd turn at Anna’s bachelorette party, where a psychic called Madame Jen (Saturday Night Live alumnus Vanessa Bayer) senses that Anna and Tess’s lifelines cross, and a sudden earthquake hits. The next morning, the four ladies wake up to discover that Anna and Tess have swapped bodies with Harper and Lily, and they must decide whether to work together or against each other to fix the messy situation. Anna and Tess (as Harper and Lily) set out in search of answers, while Harper and Lily plot to sabotage the wedding, leading to unexpected revelations about love, family and second chances.

While this is a “been there, done that” sequel, the concept of Freakier Friday is interesting, though it works far better when it’s focused on being a sweet and insightful story of relationships between single parents and their children, teen angst and midlife retrospection than when it’s going the screwball comedy route. Perhaps I’m overthinking it for a movie that’s so utterly fantasy based, but the moment that Curtis woke up as Hammons and started lamenting being stuck with an American accent, I almost got up and walked out. Really? We’re later expected to believe that Anna’s body has the muscle memory to surf like a pro because Harper can do it, and Harper can suddenly shred guitar with nimble fingers just because Lohan learned how to fake it for the first movie and her failed pop career, yet accents are apparently entirely genetic. Far too much of the first hour is just an endless series of scenes indulging Curtis’ and Lohan’s desire to pretend they are teenagers again, while Butters and Hammons (which sounds like a really disgusting snack cracker) try to get laughs with scenes of binge eating things that Anna and Tess can’t digest anymore, and riding electric scooters without their knees giving out. In particular, I found a subplot bringing back Anna’s first boyfriend, Jake (Chad Michael Murray, A Cinderella Story, Gilmore Girls), to be not only intrusive but frustrating. The character of Jake was a major highlight of the first film, and his attraction to Tess while Anna was inhabiting her body made for some truly great moments. The running gag here that he’s still stuck on Tess doesn’t play and simply turns a great character into a bad joke. All that being said, just when I found myself thinking “Will this movie please end?”, the tone shifted into an earnest yet touching and at times even insightful melodrama really turned it around for me, and by the time the movie was over, the emotional pushover in me thought “I could see this again.”

A great deal of the credit for this film working can be attributed to the strong cast, with Lohan giving her best work in a very long time, and of course Curtis is terrific. The unsung hero of the movie, however, is Butters — a truly brilliant young actor who has already proven that she can steal a scene from Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood, and who bring so many layers and so much realism to the more emotional moments later in the film that I found myself desperately hoping this movie was a smash hit just to further career. Bayer has some amusing moments as Jen, and Jacinto is likable as Eric, even if the Dirty Dancing sequence thrown in to show off his moves is nonsensical and insipid. Murray is charming but wasted, and Mark Harmon as Tess’s husband Ryan, only gets one good scene. And while I hate to be that guy, as a child of the ‘80s who saw Summer School far too many times (though in fairness, that could mean twice), seeing Harmon looking like one of Grandpa Simpson’s war buddies was beyond jarring.

Freakier Friday is a bit of a mess. At times I found myself struggling to remember who was inside whom, though in fairness to the film, that could just be my mind slowing down. I’m used to watching these movies and identifying with the younger characters, as opposed to being depressed beyond words by the premise that I’m so old that I’m watching a movie that features Lindsay Lohan trying to remember what being a young person is like, and I tried to set myself on fire twice. Still, the movie ultimately has a lot of heart and it would be good for mothers and daughters to see it together. —Patrick Gibbs

Read more Film Reviews from SLUG here:
Film Review: The Naked Gun
Film Review: The Bad Guys 2