Not a lot of live action family movies coming out of the big studios these days. So even despite my red flags abounding for Freakier Friday, I was rooting for it, so makes bank and we get more of these for everyone. But if these is the end product I’m gonna get, I guess I’ll tuck my tail and go back to Disney Plus so they can be buried there and forgotten forever.
For Gen Alpha, who weren’t around 20 years ago. Tess Coleman (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her daughter Anna (Lindsay Lohan) went through a body swap in 2003’s Freaky Friday, learning to walk in each other’s shoes and loving each other more as a result. Well now, Tess is a grandma, and Anna is a music producer and mother to California surfer teen Harper (Julia Butters). All was fine for the 3 of them…until Anna became smitten with Eric Davies (Manny Jacinto), who’s teen daughter Lily (Sophia Hammons) is Harper’s nemesis. Anna and Eric eventually decide to get married, making both teens pretty pissed. That is, until literal fortune strikes with Madame Jen (Vanessa Bayer) on Anna’s bachelorette, causing twice the amount of body swapping to happen in 2025! What powers!
Freakier Friday is at its best when Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan are channeling Lucille Ball. The best scene in the movie takes place in a record store, where Harper as Anna is trying to seduce Anna’s old flame Jake (Chad Michael Murray). Lohan gives up any semblance of dignity and dives into the utter humiliation of failed flirting, with wonderful results as an equally game Lily as Tess contorts herself to remain out of eyesight of Jake so Anna can do her thing. Murray plays the straight man excellently here to let these two cook, and leans hard into the smart character choice for what Jake is looking for in 2025. It’s the one sequence were I heard audible laughter in the theater, buoyed by my own, because of how great Lohan and Curtis were here.
But other than that…it’s tough sledding out there. Double the body swaps with only a little more runtime means the poor young girls – the emotional center of the movie – don’t get any chance to make us feel anything seriously, cutting Freakier Friday at the knees. The movie plays the beats that worked in the first: look at the old now young people eat carbs again! Look at the funny clothes the old people wear to look hip! For the parents with earned nostalgia from the first, Freakier Friday goes right for that note and never plays another, alienating the new generation along the way. The best example of this is the final act, a mostly straight remake of the first film. A better movie would have used the NEW song as the closer, to tell the 2025 tale. This movie? We close out with “Take Me Away” from the 2003 movie; yes it’s a banger…and also pure nostalgia bait, like Freakier Friday.
I’m just so bummed for the kids. Because of how stupid Freakier Friday is, they might never know a world of great family comedies on the big screen for them: a core foundation piece of my upbringing and shaping of my humor. I guess it’s back to TikTok then…and cats falling off couches while asleep. I guess we have to pause the Lindsay Lohan revival a little longer, bummer.