Once upon a time, Tess (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Anna (Lindsay Lohan) swapped bodies. So it totally tracks that the same thing would happen to them again, right? Only this time, the next generation is also dragged into the shenanigans: Anna has a teen daughter (don’t do the math, I beg of you) and her partner has a daughter, and everyone knows teenage girls are catty and terrible, so naturally they don’t get along. (I hope you can smell the sarcasm in that sentence.) But when the four-way body-swap inevitably comes around, the teens get a chance to bond. Over breaking up their parents.
Would this not track a little better if these teens were, say, 10-year-olds? Anyway.
Because Disney franchises and jokes about how terrible it is to be a woman over 40 never go away, Freakier Friday is here to bring back the Freaky Friday magic—or at least try. I genuinely hope there are better jokes in the screenplay than there have been in the trailers so far.
The film is directed by Nisha Ganatra, who previously directed the really charming Emma Thompson/Mindy Kaling comedy Late Night. Jordan Weiss (Dollface, also very charming) is credited with the screenplay, which is based on the novel by Mary Rodgers (original Freaky Friday writers Leslie Dixon and Heather Hach get a “based on characters created by” credit). Julia Butters, Sophia Hammons, Manny Jacinto, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Rosalind Chao, Chad Michael Murray, Vanessa Bayer, and Mark Harmon also star.
Freakier Friday is in theaters August 8th.
