Movie review: 'Freakier Friday' finds little humor in new premise
The forced exposition begins by catching up with Tess (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her daughter Anna (Lindsay Lohan), who switched bodies in the 2003 film Freaky Friday. Tess is still a therapist and author but delving into podcasting, which never comes up again.
Anna has become a music executive and single mother to a daughter, Harper (Julia Butters). Tess often oversteps by intruding on Anna's own parenting.
The more threatening issue is that Harper does not get along with Lily (Sophia Hammons), the daughter of Anna's fiance, Eric (Manny Jacinto). Therefore, the film has the four women swap bodies to teach a lesson.
Harper finds herself in Anna's body, while Lily is in Tess'. Anna is in Harper's body and Tess is in Lily's, meaning Lohan and Curtis are playing new characters, not each other like in the first movie. Butters and Hammons are playing the established Anna and Tess roles.
The way the new characters are introduced distracts from the conflict they're going to represent. Lily and Harper are already feuding lab partners when Anna meets Eric.
The principal (X Mayo) sets Anna and Eric up on a date and a montage shows their path to engagement. This is all irrelevant exposition.
The sequel should start with Anna and Eric already engaged and show how difficult that is for future step-siblings Harper and Lily. Step-siblings really go through that and it is challenging for their parents.
But, Freakier Friday isn't too interested in anything real. Everything that happens to the teens in adult bodies is convoluted.
Lily has to play in Tess' pickleball championship, because they mentioned pickleball once before, and also never again after this scene. Harper has to attend her mother's wedding dance rehearsals, where they pratfall through tango, hip hop and Dirty Dancing.
Harper also has to work Anna's job of managing recording artist Ella (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan). This is not a job 99% of the audience can relate to.
In the 2003 Freaky Friday, being a therapist was a normal job that lots of people may do, or perhaps have been clients of themselves. The comedy of a teenager trying to pass as a therapist practically wrote itself.
The entertainment industry is not a normal adult job even when it's accurate, and Freaky Friday's portrayal is the imaginary version anyway. Ella's photoshoot means Curtis and Lohan can do a fashion show both with some silly and some legitimately fashionable looks.
Anna was in a high school band in the previous movie, but that makes sense as something teenagers do, even if it was to highlight Lohan's music career simultaneously. Now, Ella wants to sing a song Anna wrote.
Anna's new song is the movie cliche of the fictional song that is so great it teaches everybody in the movie an important lesson, if only Anna would believe in her own talent. The song itself is fine. The dis track by Ella's ex is more of a bop.
The adults trapped in teenagers' bodies may be closer to an authentic high school experience. They are stuck in detention, which is still portrayed as an escalating scale of indignities.
Harper and Lily hope they can use Anna and Tess's bodies to sabotage Anna and Eric's wedding so they don't have to live together. That is an understandable teenage rebellion but the film fumbles even that.
Anna and Eric have an immigration meeting for their marriage because he's British. That is a real situation Harper could screw up, but the immigration officer is immediately doing a bit, so it's not even a real interview.
In the adult bodies, Harper and Lily learn things that their parents never shared with them as teenagers. Harper learns that Eric really loves her mom and that Anna is caring more for her daughter behind the scenes than Harper can visibly see.
Lily learns her father is putting his daughter first in ways she wasn't privy to as a teen, and that he's struggling with being a single father more than he lets her see. The film eventually gets to the heart of those issues, but it's never funny along the way.
Where the previous Freaky Friday was precipitated by a fortune cookie, this four-way swap is instigated by a psychic (Vanessa Bayer) at Anna's bachelorette party. Bayer gets to do some funny schtick and becomes the highlight of the movie.
Harper also contrives several reasons to not kiss Eric while she's in her mother's body. It's good they don't have a teenager kissing a 40-year-old man but wouldn't it have been better to avoid that possibility altogether? It's not as gross as Family Switch at least.
This is a really silly complaint, but why would Lily have an American accent and Tess a British one when they are in each other's bodies? Their language has already developed with their accents whichever body they're in, but really it's because Curtis wasn't going to do a British accent.
The sequel does lean into the difference between aging and teenage bodies. Tess marvels at how spry Lily's body is, but Lily struggles with Tess' arthritic knees. That is, unfortunately, a very real issue people face so it's one of the more honest attempts at humor in the film, if still totally cliche.
The joy of seeing Curtis and Lohan back together is undermined by the contrived material they are given. The new story rejects universal family experiences so the body swaps just become prolonged sketch comedy.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
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