Freaky, fun throwback to Disney's cheesy past

Winnipeg Free Press

3 days ago

This new body-swapping sequel isn't as good as Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan's original 2003 mother-daughter mix-up. But neither is it a cynical, cash-grab update.
Instead, Freakier Friday's multigenerational mayhem — we now get a four-way switch — has the kind of cheesy, clunky sincerity that's been powering Disney live-action comedies since The Love Bug days.
It's overly busy and not particularly original, but it manages a sweet, hokey vibe and benefits from return performances — now even more lived-in — by Curtis and Lohan, with some fresh support by The Good Place's Manny Jacinto.
Sixty-something Tess Coleman (Curtis) is still working as a therapist, along with doing some obligatory podcasting (expect some tech glitches). She's trying to help her daughter Anna (Lohan), now a music manager and single mom, raise rebellious teenager Harper (Julia Butters from Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood). Tess calls it 'intergenerational co-parenting.' Anna calls it 'undermining.'
Family issues get even trickier when Anna has a meet-cute with Eric Reyes (Jacinto), a widowed father who's just moved from London to Los Angeles with his daughter Lily (The Social Dilemma's Sophia Hammond).
Anna and Eric fall in love, but when they plan to get married, their respective kids balk. Harper is a dressed-down surfer girl, while Lily is a high-style snob. They don't get along. On top of the usual challenges of blended families, there's the question of whether the gang will end up living in L.A. or London.
Misunderstandings abound and problems seem insoluble, at least without magical intervention. Thankfully, this time out, scripter Jordan Weiss (Dollface) has abandoned the 'exotic Eastern mystery' ploy of the 2003 entry and is instead going with Madame Jen (SNL's Vanessa Bayer, in a funny role), a New Agey psychic/life coach/Starbucks employee who somehow engineers a two-part identity swap.
Come midnight, Anna and Harper switch bodies, which reprises some of the original movie's dynamic, while Tess and Lily do the same, which feels more like an arbitrary add-on.
While the sequel's mechanics are undeniably freakier, then, having more plotlines ends up feeling like less. In the 2003 film, there were very distinct doubled performances, as Lohan played first a mutinous teen and then a multitasking middle-aged mom stuck in the body of a mutinous teen, while Curtis went in the opposite direction. This not only made for good comedy but allowed for a focus on the characters' mother-daughter emotional issues.
Here we have more of a generalized generational face-off. Lily and Harper, in their new status as adults, scheme to sabotage their parents' upcoming nuptials, while learning how to play pickleball and marvelling at how many tissues Tess keeps in her pockets. Meanwhile, Anna and Tess, now in adolescent bodies, mostly enjoy gorging on junk food and bending without their joints cracking.
There are some comic high points — like a very intense dance class led by SNL's Chloe Fineman — but overall, Freakier Friday has fewer laughs than the original. Rather than exploring individual characters, Weiss's scripting too often defaults to generic gags about Gen Z/millennial/boomer mismatches.
Direction by Nisha Ganatra (Transparent) is high-energy but sometimes gets a bit too frantic. A high-school bake-sale food fight, for instance, just feels like a waste of butter and eggs.
The cast does what it can. The younger actors, Hammond and Butters, are clearly talented but don't get to exhibit the range the 17-year-old Lohan did back in the 2003 flick.
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Curtis, of course, has been having a terrific later-life renaissance in such projects as The Bear, The Sticky, The Last Showgirl and Everything Everywhere All at Once, and she's game for anything here. Lohan is finally getting a much-deserved comeback after being pummelled by the pop-culture machine that so often punishes young female stars. It feels good to see the pair back together.
And while the men of the Freaky Friday franchise tend to be charmingly irrelevant, Jacinto's gorgeous, funny, self-deprecating turn really affirms his potential leading-man quality.
There are loads of nostalgic callbacks. (It's not necessary to have seen the first flick to understand this one, but it will help with the in-jokes.) There are drop-ins by Anna's old bandmates and her little brother. Mark Harmon once again provides a calming influence as Ryan, while onetime '90s cute-boy Chad Michael Murray gets a chance to redeem the awkwardness of his 2003 role as Jake, the high school employee who was (sort of) romancing both a 15-year-old and her mother. That bizarro setup gets a knowing joke in the last scene here.
The premise of the Freaky Friday series is partly about how the passing of time can change our outlook. This outing doesn't quite replicate the magic of the original, but by drawing affectionately on the older story while adding some youthful updates, the cast and crew of Freakier Friday mostly 'make good choices.'
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Alison GillmorWriter
Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto's York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992.
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