The freakiest thing about Freakier Friday is the airbrushing of Lindsay Lohan's past
A great deal has changed – especially for Lohan – in the intervening 22 years. She's been through a crash-and-burn pariah phase, which involved jail time and multiple rehab stints. In 2013, she was opportunistically cast in Paul Schrader's grim meta-porno The Canyons. And now – after paving the way with three Netflix romcoms – she is finally mounting this Disney-approved comeback.
Freakier Friday waves a wand and asks us to pretend that none of Lohan's struggles ever happened – which is perhaps the one freaky thing about it. The film is an Etch-a-Sketch wiped clean; unobjectionable fun, if a trifle anodyne.
We shouldn't belabour the plot that causes single mum Anna (Lohan) and solicitous gran Tess (Curtis) to swap bodies yet again. Crucially (and awkwardly) it's not with each other. This time, it's with a pair of Gen Z family members who are sworn enemies. Harper (The Fabelmans' Julia Butters) is Anna's sullen rebel of a daughter, while Lily (Sophia Hammons) is her snooty British stepsister-to-be, after a whirlwind romance between Anna and a fellow single parent, her new fiancé Eric (Manny Jacinto).
These complications want to spin off into fluffy absurdity. Instead they thicken into treacle. It's a mistake to have Lohan and Curtis mainly interact as new characters, because the emotional core between their old pair gets dislodged – though it certainly helps that Butters is such a splendid, grounding co-star both before and after the switcheroo.
We might forget that Curtis has now won an Oscar (for Everything Everywhere All At Once), if it weren't that her reliable comedic chops are, thankfully, right to the fore. This time, when she bolts up in horror to bemoan the crevices in her face and 'having no lips', it's a disarming self-roast, and one of the funniest moments. You do wish, though, that they'd have let Lohan, who seems theoretically game, risk a touch of that sort of thing herself.
You get your money's worth of that jolly staple, American actors putting on intentionally bad British accents. You also get, by my count, one A+ one-liner about Facebook, and one great overall scene. It's in a record shop, where Lohan-as-Harper tries to sabotage the wedding by throwing herself in front of Anna's old flame Jake (Chad Michael Murray, who played her boyfriend in the original, amusingly wheeled on as a befuddled man-prop).
The kicker there is Curtis-as-Lily lurking behind the LPs, and occasionally surfacing with her face masked by a boomer time capsule – The Best of Sade! Sinead O'Connor! – to remain incognito. I probably chortled as much in that few minutes as in the rest of the film's runtime combined, because they strike the perfect tone of goofy nostalgia sprinkled over tart physical comedy. The rest is not going to rock anyone's world, but go in with the right expectations, and it may work some modest magic.
PG cert, 111 min. In cinemas from Aug 8
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