The 2003 Disney comedy Freaky Friday marked a notable creative junction for both of its stars, despite their relative age differences and career paths: It was Lindsay Lohan’s last Disney movie before Mean Girls really catapulted her into the zeitgeist, while Jamie Lee Curtis was wrapping up her run as a Final Girl in the Halloween movies (at least, for several decades) before pivoting to the role of Mom in more family-friendly fare like Christmas with the Kranks. The two were perfectly situated to play multitasking working mom Tess and her misunderstood rocker daughter Anna, who spend twenty-four hours literally walking in each other’s shoes in order to discover just how tough the other has it. Add in early-2000s fashion and music, and it is an underrated classic for many Millennials.
Twenty-odd years later, Freakier Friday starts strong by revisiting mother and daughter, now transformed into grandmother and mother, struggling to coparent rebellious teen Harper (Julia Butters). That’s not easy, as the ninth grader is mired in her own adolescent psychodramas further complicated by a new stepfather Eric (Manny Jacinto) and stepsister Lily (Sophia Hammons). Both movies dole out sly observations on how parenting is not one-size-fits-all; opening with Anna failing at gentle parenting (and her own self-regulation) while Tess has doubled down on being a know-it-all therapist makes fertile ground for the Colemans’ tendency to talk right past each other.
But the sequel’s intergenerational switcheroo—Anna/Harper and Tess/Lily—changes the math on whose emotional journey the body swap is for. Even though Lohan and Curtis still spend the most time onscreen, this is no longer Anna and Tess’ movie. Mom and Grams have become supporting characters for Harper and Lily to figure out how to coexist without breaking up their blended family. Further loading down the movie with constant callbacks to the first movie (in place of character development for those familiar faces), as well as Lohan-centric inside jokes, makes it more akin to an episode of Pop-Up Video than a proper sequel.
Even without their parents’ impending nuptials, Harper and Lily wouldn’t sit together in the high school cafeteria; the former is a chill L.A. surfer girl, while the latter is a prissy expat and aspiring fashion designer from London. But when Anna falls for Eric (and truly, who can blame her), what they decide is best for the family is to move everyone overseas—heartbreaking for Harper with her morning wave-shredding, and for Tess with both of her girls no longer within reach.
The body swap is clearly intended to force some necessary perspective shifts, but it lacks its predecessor’s emotional underpinning about a teenager learning to grow up a little and an adult rediscovering her youthful freedom. The ageism is particularly egregious this time around, amplified by a stunning amount of ableism. Having rewatched Freaky Friday at the age that adult Anna now is, it was clear that 46-year-old Curtis shrieking about the Crypt Keeper was funny because she was not that old. But the new wave of the same jokes (now a Birkin bag left out to melt) twenty years later is just cruel. What’s much funnier, and which Curtis sells just as well, is Lily-as-Tess discovering the mundane horrors of enema kits and adult diapers at Walgreens; but even that is more gag than actual learning experience. Other zingers land better, like mocking Boomers’ obsession with pickleball; requisite gluten-free and safe-space jokes at Gen Z’s expense fall flat.
A well-meaning attempt to rectify the original’s clumsy stereotyping of Asian mysticism offers a muddled explanation for why this is happening again, by way of Vanessa Bayer’s ditzy fortune-teller Madame Jen. Though in truth, this only reconfirms that there’s no need for a meddling outsider; it should just be the universe upending things to right them again.
Oddly enough, the veterinary office I stopped at en route to the screening was playing Labor Pains, a forgotten 2009 comedy in which Lohan’s scatterbrained publishing secretary fakes a pregnancy to keep her job. It was the kind of screwball part that marked the peak of her popularity, and one of her last roles (aside from Elizabeth Taylor, oof) before a spate of parodying herself because her scandals had overshadowed any of her real work. While Lohan has made something of a comeback in the past few years, one still gets the sense that she’s mining her own checkered past even in this; there are sly references to Mean Girls, and more than one Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen-inspired fashion moment. Adult Anna feels less like a clear continuation of the constantly-undermined teen from Freaky Friday, and more like a greatest-hits of Lohan’s past onscreen personas. Any opportunity to delve into what it’s like for Anna to be in her mom’s shoes thanks to age and experience rather than magic—and for what it means that Tess is navigating uncharted territory as a working grandma—is left unexplored.
This is not helped by the movie’s hugely glaring plot hole: Why is Anna a mom in the first place? Tess hand-waves it away with “when my daughter decided to become a single mom,” which could initially be read as her going it alone via sperm donor… except that she would have had to be about 21 to make this choice, and that math just does not math. So, is it more likely that Anna accidentally got pregnant and Tess enthusiastically yes-and-ed her on keeping the baby? Does that mean that her first love Jake (Chad Michael Murray) is Harper’s dad, or some random Pink Slip groupie?? When in all of this did she leave the band, and how much time passed before the former songwriter/musician decided to pivot to managing other rising talent? Make it make sense!
Whew. Let’s take a breath and recenter. (If we were in Freakier Friday, I would repeat this callback until it stops being funny.)
There’s a Mamma Mia vibe to some of the casting choices—let’s bring back a beloved Parent Trap grown-up! SNL’s Chloe Fineman wants to practice her Australian accent as the wedding dance instructor? Why not! The problem in trying to redo the premise for a new generation is introducing a whole other family whose conflicts feel tonally out of pace with the sequel’s hijinks. (Though Manny Jacinto channels Patrick Swayze in a moment that made our whole theater gasp in delight.) No matter how compellingly Jacinto and Hammons express their grief about leaving behind memories of his late wife (and her mother), this doesn’t feel like the movie for that.
Where the movie is strongest is in revisiting the characters from the original in these new life phases. The Pink Slip bandmates provide a fascinating what-if for Anna if she had decided to stay in the limelight, though aside from a few lines about not being teenagers anymore, they’re still only tangential to her story. Murray’s return as Jake is a high point because of how cheekily the movie doubles down on him still holding a torch for Tess; clearly Anna never actually let him in on the switcheroo. (I know we’re in a supposed CMM-aissance, but neither his Full Monty Hallmark romance nor any potential One Tree Hill reboot cameos can top this.)
This body-swapping sequel won’t change any hearts or minds, but it’ll give you a few good laughs. And even though Anna and Tess don’t reach any breakthroughs in Freakier Friday, it is unequivocally great to see Lohan and Curtis tapping back into some of the first movie’s magic—and doing so side-by-side, looking like they’re having just as much fun as they did twenty years ago.
