It’s August of 2003. Adrien Brody won an Oscar earlier in the year. Sarah Jessica Parker and Noah Wyle lead two of the hottest shows on TV. A Republican demon occupies the White House. And the Lindsay Lohan-Jamie Lee Curtis body-swapping comedy Freaky Friday is released in movie theaters across America.
It’s August of 2025. Adrien Brody won an Oscar earlier in the year. Sarah Jessica Parker and Noah Wyle lead two of the hottest shows on TV. A Republican demon occupies the White House. And the Lindsay Lohan-Jamie Lee Curtis body-swapping comedy Freakier Friday is released in movie theaters across America.
Modern day pop culture is stuck in a time loop, seemingly unable to mature and establish itself as anything but a repetitive nostalgia-invoking machine. It’s almost as if we’re all repeatedly being shoved back into our own younger bodies, forced to relive moments and events we thought we’d moved past. In that way, it’s easy to feel sympathy for the panicked characters played by Curtis and Lohan in Freakier Friday, who find themselves ripped from their physical forms (again) and mysteriously placed in the bodies of two teenagers. Yes, their characters seem to have some sort of unwanted superhuman ability to transport their souls away from themselves in times of stress, but this time, they’re not swapping with each other. What truly makes this a freakier Friday than the already-freaky one they experienced in the first film is the fact that the number of body swaps has doubled. If that sounds somewhat daunting to track, such fear is validated by the film. Besides the admirable efforts of Curtis and Lohan, Freakier Friday is yet another lazy cash grab from Disney – a studio that seems hellbent on fracking their own back catalogue for all its worth until there’s truly nothing left.
To the film’s credit, it knows what its audience wants. Namely, the on-screen reunion of Lohan and Curtis; the former is aughts nostalgia personified and the latter is a Hollywood legend who has only become more lauded since Freaky Friday (just check her trophy shelf). And anyone buying a ticket simply hoping for as much time with the two actresses as possible will undoubtedly be satisfied. But here lies the first trap that screenwriter Jordan Weiss writes herself into (we’ll come back to that). In order to make things even more freaky, it wouldn’t be enough to simply have Tess (Curtis) swap bodies with her daughter Anna (Lohan) again. There must be more swapping! Enter Harper (Julia Butters), Anna’s daughter-slash-Tess’s granddaughter, and Lily (Sophia Hammons), the daughter of Anna’s fiancé Eric (Manny Jacinto). After a chaotic night at Anna’s bachelorette party, all four of them find themselves inhabiting the body of another after interacting with a fortune teller (Vanessa Bayer). Tess and Lily have swapped bodies, while Anna has switched places with Harper.
It’s a pretty logical acceleration of the first film’s stakes. After all, it wouldn’t quite make sense for Tess and Anna to swap with each other, given that they already learned their lesson of considering things from each other’s point of view in the first film. But at the same time, audiences would inevitably be dissatisfied if they were forced to spend the same amount of time with the admittedly talented young stars as with Lohan and Curtis. As such, the film feels imbalanced, relying too much on the honed talents and throwback appeal of Curtis and Lohan, giving Butters and Hammons far less to do. At the same time, because the first film’s body swap helped Tess and Anna sand down their edges and find common ground, their personalities aren’t as defined in this film. As such, the young actresses who must embody them post-swap have much less to build their characters off of, instead being forced to lean on sight gags and easy jokes about aging.
Speaking of jokes – thankfully, the screenplay is especially focused on making audiences laugh. That may seem like an obvious aspect of comedy filmmaking that’s not worthy of praise, but films that are singular comedies with no hyphen necessary (action-comedy, comedy-drama, etc.) are increasingly rare. Weiss peppers her screenplay with tossed-off lines and wry observations that are genuinely hilarious. It’s not exactly a laugh riot, but outside of some cringe-inducing moments of over-the-top character behavior, it’s pretty consistently funny.
Of course, a screenplay’s jokes are nothing without talented actors to deliver them. As with the first film, Lohan and, especially, Curtis are excellent. Both are fully committed to their characters’ fantastical comedic realities. This time, they’re both playing above-it-all youths in the bodies of older figures of authority, which leads to moments of hilarious dichotomy between how they appear and how they speak and behave. Curtis completely throws herself into the role (quite literally – it’s a very physical performance). From the first moments post-swap where she screams in a mirror, investigating her own face – just as in the first film – it’s clear that she hasn’t lost any of the comedic ingenuity that garnered her such acclaim back in 2003. And Lohan is a worthy partner. She’s totally game (one sequence involving her trying to awkwardly seduce another character is particularly funny) and also believably plays a warm, loving mother trying to raise a daughter in an increasingly difficult world. And outside of all that, it’s just nice to see Lohan on the big screen in a film worthy of her talents, which first launched her to superstardom over two decades ago. This is her first theatrical film since the 2013 Paul Schrader flop The Canyons, and Freakier Friday is as much a celebration of Lohan as anything else. The movie is filled with in-jokes that call to mind the more celebrated moments of her career, such as the date of Anna’s upcoming wedding (take a wild guess, Mean Girls fans) and a cameo from Elaine Hendrix, best known for playing the villainess in Lohan’s film debut, The Parent Trap. Those hoping for a triumphant big screen return for Lindsay Lohan will be pleased.
But the film that surrounds these two excellent performances fails to live up to the hard work that the actresses are putting in. Alongside the wobbly screenplay, Nisha Ganatra’s direction is similarly uneven. The film is poorly paced, with choppy editing that – paired with consistently nonsensical camera placement – makes it surprisingly difficult to keep track of certain necessities like time and space. In fact, there’s not a lot of attention to detail throughout. For example, in one notably mystifying moment, Chad Michael Murray’s character enters a scene on a motorcycle. But at the end of that same scene, Curtis and Lohan leave in his car. It may seem silly to fret about logic in a body swap movie, but such unrealistic premises require a grounded base against which the silliness can feel comparatively outlandish.
But to those wishing to simply turn their brains off and overlook such specifics in service of scratching that irrepressible itch of nostalgia, Freakier Friday is sure to satisfy. And admittedly, it’s hard to feel too upset in the face of both the welcome reprise of the comedic high point of Jamie Lee Curtis’s career and the long-awaited return of Lindsay Lohan to cinemas. But let’s put a stop to this before we’re subjected to Freakiest Friday, which will assumingly go straight to our Disney+ cerebral microchips in 2047.
