There’s been a lot of Freaky Fridays, all born from the 1972 novel by Mary Rodgers. But just ahead of director Mark Waters and teen idol Lindsay Lohan’s era-defining comedy Mean Girls, they teamed up for the Freaky Friday that still stands out from its playful predecessors.
2003’s Freaky Friday was a kinetic and joyously chaotic mother-daughter comedy that managed to be cool. Its fashions were enviable. It’s comedy crackled, thanks to the odd couple chemistry between Lohan and her onscreen mom, Jamie Lee Curtis. Plus, the movie’s fictional band Pink Slip laid down „Take Me Away,“ a a cover of a Lash song that rocked even outside the movie. What more could a sequel 22 years after this hit hope to bring? Well, double the bodyswap for starters.
Directed by Nisha Ganatra, Freakier Friday sees its mother-daughter heroines bodyswap with a pair of bickering teens. Generations (Boomers, millennials, and Gen Z) clash in everything from clothes and eating habits to who should be marrying whom. Two times the bodyswappers means two times the life lessons, making for a plot line so stuffed with schtick and silly sequences that it can lag at just under two hours. Still, Freakier Friday is a good time, coasting on the charms from the previous film that still glow on (and on and on and on).
Freakier Friday is the anti-Parent Trap.
Credit: Glen Wilson / Disney Enterprises, Inc.
In that other Lindsay Lohan vehicle, two long-lost sisters pull twinsie shenanigans to get their divorced parents back together again. In Freakier Friday, surfer girl Harper (Julia Butters) and posh aspiring fashion designer Lily (Sophia Hammons) are high school nemeses, who are horrified when their single parents meet-cute over a disciplinary trip to the principal’s office.
Set roughly 30 years after Freaky Friday, Freakier Friday sees once rebellious teen Lohan’s Anna Coleman all grown up, a 36-and-a-half-year-old single-mom working as a manager to insecure pop idol Ella (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan). As for Curtis‘ Dr. Tess Coleman, she is bringing her skills as a therapist to her parenting podcast, self-help books, and to “co-grand parenting” Harper. But Anna’s fast-approaching wedding to Lily’s dad, hunky chef Eric (Manny Jacinto), has all four ladies losing their empathy for each other. Cue the manic multi-hyphenate fortune teller/life coach/barista (a winsomely flighty Vanessa Bayer) who performs a mystical bodyswap spell.
Harper’s consciousness ends up in the body of her mom, Anna. Lily bodyswaps with her soon-to-be grandma Tess. And vice versa. Meaning Lohan and Curtis are playing teens again. While their younger co-stars mug sternly, make jokes about regaining a metabolism „the speed of light,“ and frolic on electric scooters, Freaky Friday’s dynamic duo fling themselves into silly sequences involving a frenzied photo shoot, catastrophic attempts at flirting, and the teen comedy cliché of driving a muscle car recklessly. All of this while Harper and Lily try to use their grown-up bodies to call off their parents‘ wedding, which they think is ruining their lives.
No one came for the plot.
Credit: Glen Wilson / Disney Enterprises, Inc.
And yet, there’s a lot of it. Too much even. Screenwriter Jordan Weiss (Dollface) sets up big stakes for Freakier Friday with the bodyswap occurring just three days before Anna and Eric’s wedding. (On October 3rd! A Mean Girls reference!) It’s a good ticking clock. But while Harper and Lily are hellbent on nuptial interruption, Anna and Tess get lost in a half-hearted plot about in-school suspension and tracking down the meddling mystic.
For Tess, Weiss wedges in an upcoming book tour and a pickleball tournament, a detail that must have been part of the SAG/AFTRA negotiations, as it seems a requirement to mention this sport in any comedy featuring a lead actor above the age of 50. Unfortunately, sequences about sports, scooters, and a dance class gone awry feel suffocated in the film’s whirring drive to get the plot going. There’s just so much here, and some sequences are so rushed that their jokes have no room to breathe, becoming just a barrage of comical mayhem without a satisfying punchline.
Still, it’s nice to see terrific comedic performers like Ramakrishnan, Bayer, June Diane Raphael, Sherry Cola, and Stephen Tobolowski pop-up for brief but amusing appearances.
Freakier Friday is at its best when it leans on Lohan and Curtis.
Credit: Glen Wilson / Disney Enterprises, Inc.
Lohan is solid as a frustrated straight man to Curtis‘ clown. And as she did in the first film, the latter, now an Academy Award winner courtesy of Everything Everywhere All At Once, goes hard for every joke. A sequence in a record store is particularly hilarious, as Curtis balances prop work, pratfalls, and ludicrous dialogue like „I have to find old people music…like Coldplay.“ (OK, it’s not that she’s wrong…)
Props to Chad Michael Murray, who reprises his Freaky Friday role of Jake, Anna’s high school crush; his surprisingly sweet revival of the character gets a terrific payoff in the finale. But moreover, the chemistry between Murray and a flustered Curtis is hot enough that I wouldn’t be mad if somebody made a May-December rom-com with the two of them.
For her part, Lohan has a trickier role when it comes to romance. As Anna, she is the smitten love interest to Jacinto’s swoon-worthy (albeit one-note) Eric. When she’s Harper in Anna’s body, she’s playing a teen girl desperate to duck out of the strong arms of her soon-to-be stepdad (who does not know bodies have been swapped!). So a sequence wherein Jacinto replicates Patrick Swayze moves from Dirty Dancing will have women of several generations absolutely giddy. But for Lohan, it’s a setup for a comical escape.
Credit: Glen Wilson / Disney Enterprises, Inc.
As with its predecessor, Freakier Friday is about family at its core. So, naturally the third act is where everyone needs to learn a lesson while keeping things fun. With four bodies swapped, this gets convoluted. But that’s practically a requirement of a bodyswap movie. To Ganatra’s credit, the climax is engaging and genuinely touching. And that’s thanks in no small part to mindful callbacks and role reprisals from the first film. Let’s just say, some tracks are still bangers.
In the end, Freakier Friday isn’t better than the original. But it is fun, entertaining, and funny. On top of the winning performances of Curtis and Lohan, there’s a meta joy to seeing a real-life wild child return to her roots for a victory lap. That she gets to rock out while doing it is all the better.