"Freakier Friday" Review

Since our last movie was the waaaaaaaaaay overdue sequel, Spinal Tap 2: The End Continues, coming 41 years after its original film, it was time to check in with Freakier Friday, the 22 years later sequel to the 2003 Freaky Friday which itself was the second remake of 1976's Jodie Foster version. While Lindsey Lohan had garnered acclaim for her work in the 1997 remake of The Parent Trap (filmed when she only 11 years old), it was the tag team of Freaky Friday and Mean Girls the following year, along with a great hosting shot on SNL that rocketed her to mega-stardom. Which she then immediately squandered by hanging out with Paris Hilton, doing drugs, and becoming a nightmare to work and having a long string of bombs pretty much sending her to Career Purgatory. (I really laid into her in my 2011 Mean Girls Blu-ray review. Hit link for harshness.)

Now a 39-year-old mother who lives in Dubai with her Kuwaiti financier husband, she's back to collect a check from Disney's constant rehashing of their already remade and sequeled to death IPs with her co-star Jamie Lee Curtis, who's been on a career tear lately as she's added two more parts of her EGOT with an Emmy for her guest appearance on The Bear and an Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once to go with her True Lies Golden Globe (which she should've been Oscar nommed).

The movie wastes no time infodumping the audience and raising questions beginning with who was the sperm donor for Anna Coleman's "choice to be a single mother" to her daughter Harper (Julia Butters), a rebellious teenager who loves to surf. Tess Coleman (Curtis) is a podcaster/author/therapist who's there to help raise Harper while Anna works as a music producer, having left her rock band dreams behind.

At school, Harper is annoyed by the snobby new student from England, Lily Reyes (Sophia Hammons), who's her lab partner and when an experiment blows up on them, their parents are summoned leading to Anna meeting Lily's father, Eric (Manny Jacinto), instantly falling in love with him and their becoming engaged six months later to the mutual horror of their daughters.

At Anna's bachelorette party, both Anna and Tess and Harper and Lily receive palm readings from a dodgy mystic, Madame Jen (Vanessa Bayer), after which they all feel an earthquake that no one else does. (Ruh-roh.) The next morning, everyone wakes up to discover they've swapped bodies - Anna and Harper switch mother-daughter style like the last time and Tess and Lily switch with Lily traumatized by being in an old woman's body while Tess enjoys not aching and farting while moving around. (And the audience learns that accents are tied to bodies, not people as Tess keeps Lily's posh accent while Lily-in-Tess doesn't.)

Since they've gone through this before, Anna and Tess tell Harper and Lily to pretend to be them while they run around prepping for Anna's wedding and trying to keep Ella (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), a pop artist Anna's working with on an even keel after being dumped by her pop star boyfriend. The daughters use their body time to try and split their parents up so the wedding doesn't happen. Will they succeed or will they learn to understand each other and get their bodies back? Duh.

I vaguely remember seeing the first Freaky Friday ages ago - I see I own the DVD, but never upgraded to Blu-ray - but can't remember much other than I liked it OK. I didn't revisit it before watching the sequel, so a lot of the callbacks like Anna's crush, Jake (Chad Michael Murray), having the hots for Tess (a duh thing when Curtis was ~42, but questionable at 64) and that Tess's husband, Ryan (Mark Harmon), was the wedding Anna was trying to break up, didn't land much with me.

The tone is really frenetic and silly, but as a PG-rated Disney flick, I guess that's what the kiddies want: By-choice single motherhood. Not to harp on this, but why not just kill off Harper's baby daddy or have them divorced so there's the irony of trying to bust up Anna's marriage when Harper comes from a broken home. Eric is a widower and Lily's feeling that Daddy is going to forget her mother hovers over things. Come on, Disney, either go all-in or stop fooling around.

As for the body swapped performances, with four people involved there's less time to develop the characters' behaviors. As mentioned previously, why does Tess in Lily's body have the accent but not vice versa? Tess suddenly having an English accent then trying to squelch that would've been amusing. The subplots about Ella the pop singer and misunderstanding what a song Anna wrote is about isn't very compelling and the final concert scene begs questions about why Ella seems like a guest at her own show?

While there are a few good laughs in Freakier Friday there is a lack of focus to the script and overly frenetic direction by Nisha Ganatra (nothing you've heard of) which makes it disposable. If fact, the next day I remembered that we'd watched some TV shows and SNL, but completely forgot we'd watched this beforehand.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable/streaming (probably Mouse+).