Latest news with #body-swap
Daily Mail
08-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Freakier Friday review: Twice as many body swaps, but this ropy sequel's only half the fun, writes BRIAN VINER
Freakier Friday (PG, 111 mins) Almost half a century has passed since the original Freaky Friday, adapted by Mary Rodgers from her own 1972 novel. She was the daughter of Richard Rodgers, co-writer with Oscar Hammerstein of The Sound Of Music, The King And I, South Pacific and Oklahoma! What a brilliant family. We still love her father's musicals and her mischievous body-swap premise still has legs... in Freakier Friday, no fewer than eight of them. The bodies swapped in both the 1976 film and the hit 2003 remake with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan were those of a quarrelling mother and daughter, each of whom benefited from seeing the world from the other's perspective. Emotional growth, I think they call it. In Freakier Friday, a sequel to the 2003 film again starring Lohan and Curtis, the phenomenon befalls not just one pair of females but two. And yet, instead of being twice as good it's only half as good. There's a lesson there somewhere. Anna (Lohan) is now the single mum of a surf-crazy teenager, Harper (Julia Butters). Her own mother, Tess (Curtis), helps out however she can. But their sunny Californian existence is rocked when a new love interest enters Anna's life: an affable restaurateur called Eric (Manny Jacinto), who, following his wife's death, has moved from England with his daughter Lily (Sophia Hammons). Unhelpfully for them but crucially for the clunky plot, Lily and Harper go to the same high school and are sworn enemies. 'She thinks she's so much better than everyone because she's British,' complains Harper, pronouncing it 'Briddish' but savaging Lily's 'obnoxious' accent. She has a point. Lily is as supercilious as only a Brit given lines by a Hollywood screenwriter can be. Moreover, young Hammons, though pretty as a picture, somehow keeps forgetting to act. Maybe we should blame Jordan Weiss's ropy script, or the effort (for a Californian) of straining for those Knightsbridge vowels. Anyway, the enmity between the two girls reaches fever-pitch when, in double-quick time, Anna and Eric get engaged. In a horrifying development for Harper, their plan is to move to London 'where an avocado costs $11'. Lily is similarly appalled by the prospect of moving back home with a step-sister she loathes. But in the nick of time, magical realism strikes. In the 2003 movie it was a wily Chinese woman with fortune cookies who masterminded the body-swap, but some critics got shirty about 'cultural stereotyping', so this time it falls to a chaotic all-American psychic (amusingly played by Vanessa Bayer). The upshot is that Harper moves into her mother's body, while Lily swaps places with Harper's grandma Tess (and, of course, vice versa). Which is all very confusing, but at least gives Curtis a chance to parade her commendable lack of vanity by staring into a mirror and wailing about her lined face and 'non-existent' lips. There is some passable comedy in all this, as Harper and Lily in their new guises at first continue trying to undermine their parents' relationship, and in fairness there were smatterings of merry laughter at the screening I went to earlier this week. Weapons (18, 128 mins) Verdict: Ingenious horror-thriller Rating: Weapons is actually a whole lot freakier, a really top-notch psychological thriller that develops into full-on and decidedly gory supernatural horror. It is properly gripping throughout. The writer-director is Zach Cregger, whose debut solo feature was the electrifyingly tense Barbarian (2022). This is a terrific follow-up, a fascinating portrait of a small American town traumatised by a terrible episode: in the dead of night, at precisely 2.17am, 17 children from a single elementary-school class get out of their beds and run away from home, all disappearing without trace. Many of the aghast parents and townsfolk suspect the children's teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), of knowing more than she is letting on. Miss Gandy in turn thinks the mystery must have something to do with Alex, the one child in the class who didn't vanish (a super performance by nine-year-old Cary Christopher). Very adroitly, Cregger tells the entire creepy story in six chapters, examining many of the same events from the perspectives of half a dozen key characters. Among them is the father of one missing kid, played by Josh Brolin. At first he too is suspicious of Miss Gandy, but, dissatisfied with the police's progress, he investigates on his own, leading him down an altogether different path. There are deliberate hints, not least in the title, of Weapons being a kind of metaphor for all those school shootings that so scar modern-day America. But that's not what has happened to these children, so what has? You'll find no clues here, but I can tell you there are some whopping jump-scares, and a wildly overwrought ending that's tempered by some nicely judged humour. It's an ingeniously crafted tale, exceedingly well told. Both films are in cinemas now.
The Guardian
05-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Freakier Friday review – puppyishly uninhibited Jamie Lee Curtis saves body-swap sequel
No one could be gamer or goofier than Jamie Lee Curtis in this latest twist in the Freaky Friday body-swap franchise; she finds some distinctly likable form, plays broad comedy to the hilt and pretty much carries the movie – with the help of some nice supporting cameo turns – when her co-star Lindsay Lohan isn't exactly nailing the laughs. And it should be said that as an essay in alternative existences and parallel realities, this film and Curtis's starring role are far more interesting than the bafflingly overrated Oscar-winner Everything Everywhere All at Once. The preceding film, from 2003, had Curtis and Lohan as a quarrelling mother and daughter who swap bodies due to the hilarious magical otherness of Chinese fortune cookies. (In 2025, the new version is a bit culturally lairy of gags like that.) It is based on Mary Rodgers's 1972 novel, first filmed in 1976 with Jodie Foster as the daughter, a formidably precocious young star who was in those days considered to be already body-swapped into fierce adulthood. The publicity for this film promises legacy cameos and when one teen character talks about her French boyfriend, many FF fans will have been excitably wondering if this French boyfriend has a French-speaking mom played by a certain French-speaking star? In this new contemporary reality, written by Jordan Weiss and directed by Nisha Ganatra, Curtis's character Tess Coleman is a grandma, therapist and parenting podcaster, and her once-tearaway daughter, Lohan's character Anna, is a music producer and single mom to a Gen-Z teen; this is Harper, played by Julia Butters, a young actor still legendary for her scene opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. When Harper has a big fight in school with her obnoxious, princess-y British lab partner, Lily (played by non-Briton Sophia Hammons), she is horrified when Anna falls hard for Lily's hot single dad Eric (Manny Jacinto); these enemies are both appalled at the prospect of becoming stepsisters. This situation becomes even more complicated – freakier in fact – when a zany palm reader and fortune teller triggers a new cosmic body-swap nightmare, this time involving four women, not two. Another version of this movie might have wanted to dip its toe into the issues of body image and identity: Freakier Friday keeps it light, partly as a result of Curtis's jokey grandma, in whose knockabout generational presence there is no question of anything tricky. Curtis gets the laughs with her puppyishly uninhibited performance and there are some great gags, including one at the expense of oldsters who use a certain social media platform. There are also some amusing contributions from SNL trouper Vanessa Bayer as the fortune teller, comedian X Mayo as the school's dyspeptic principal and Santina Muha as a US official who has to assess the authenticity of Anna and Eric's marriage. As for Lohan, she does a reasonable job, although her own body-swapped status as the legendary wild-child of old who is now playing a stressed middle-aged person has to remain unemphasised, simply because Lohan doesn't really have the comedy chops. It's Curtis who embodies the story's wacky spirit. Freakier Friday is out on 7 August in Australia and 8 August in the UK and US.
Bloomberg
05-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Bloomberg
In Freakier Friday, Lindsay Lohan Gives the Performance We Didn't Know We Needed
To describe just how meaningful the Lindsay Lohan-Jamie Lee Curtis remake of Freaky Friday was to a 13-year-old in 2003, I'll use an anecdote. Shortly after seeing the movie with my mom, she asked me if I wanted to get a second piercing in my ear, a gesture that meant the world to an awkward tween desperate for some edge. My mom understood that Lohan in that movie was the pinnacle of cool, and that she could in turn gain some cred, just like Curtis on screen, if she submitted to my whims. Meanwhile, I got a little closer to approximating Lohan's perfect teen aura. In the early 2000s she was an influencer before that was even a term, the most famous girl in the world, who seemed destined for unstoppable greatness. That was the magic of the movie, directed by Mark Waters, which updated the body-swap plot to the early '00s with a lot of heart and a little bit of pop punk. The movie succeeded because of how equally balanced it was to the perspectives of mother and daughter—with Curtis and Lohan both turning in genius comedic performances that were funny but never felt mocking.
South China Morning Post
05-08-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Freakier Friday movie review: Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis reunite for chaotic sequel
3/5 stars Freakier Friday, the somewhat belated, uninhibited sequel to 2003's body-swap comedy Freaky Friday, reunites Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan as the mother and daughter who previously got to experience what it is like to be the other person. This time, the body-swap madness is multiplied, although bigger does not necessarily mean better. It certainly means more confusion, with viewers frequently left wondering who is who. Lohan's Anna is now a single mother herself, to teen daughter Harper (Julia Butters). She is also on the verge of walking down the aisle with Eric (Manny Jacinto), an expat who also has a daughter, Lily, (Sophia Hammons) in the ninth grade with Harper. Anna and Eric want to move the family to London after the wedding, a plan causing consternation and conflict with their offspring. Play Then, after an encounter with a fortune-teller (Vanessa Bayer), the transfer happens again – only this time, bodies are swapped between Anna and Harper, and Anna's mother Tess (Curtis) and Lily.
