The latest nostalgia bait sequel from Disney is in theaters and … it’s actually pretty good!
Freakier Friday isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel— it’s like the same old story never ends. The main thrust of the movie is still a daughter who doesn’t want her mother to get married (now plus an extra daughter of the groom who also wants to break up the marriage!) And when the two young girls get swapped into the bodies of our original duo of Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis as Anna and Tess Coleman, they realize, just like Lohan in the original, that they now have the power to potentially ruin the marriage and get just what they want.
Except, the point of the body swap is for everybody to understand each other’s perspective, which of course happens over this film’s 1 hour and 51 minute runtime.
It’s double the swaps and double the fun, right? Well, not entirely. The decision to have two sets of characters swapping places cuts the character development on any one character by about half and lends itself more toward silly set pieces than real character growth, some of which feel forced due to the divided screen time.
Still, the comedy works well, with Curtis in particular bringing her reckless abandon, while the young actresses hold their own.
Julia Butters is Harper, Anna’s daughter, who loves to surf and knows nothing but California. Sophia Hammons is Lily, the daughter of Anna’s fiancé Eric (Manny Jacinto). Eric and Lily are British-Filipino, and Harper finds Lily’s proper popularity to be insufferable (they’re rivals before their parents meet).
While the girls don’t like each other, and that alone could stand as a reason for the two to oppose the marriage of their parents, the real problem is where the family might end up living. As a surfer girl with all ties in California, Harper is deadset against the possibility go the family moving with Eric back to Britain. And Lily is still struggling with the loss of her mother, and wants to attend a fashion school in London, so she can’t stand the thought of staying in California.
The fashion-designer element of Lily’s character makes this feel a bit Disney Channel—not that a young girl shouldn’t dream of being a fashion designer or couldn’t become one, but it makes the character feel a bit less grounded in the way they portray that.
As tensions culminate at Anna’s family-friendly bachelorette party, the two girls, along with Anna and Tess, all cross paths with Madame Jen (Vanessa Bayer), who, despite acting like a really sketchy, unreliable psychic, manages to pull off the original curse. As a result, Anna swaps bodies with her daughter Harper, and Tess swaps bodies with Lily. Why the curse chose to swap Tess and Lily is honestly beyond me, but it brings Curtis into the action,n which is fine by me.
Anna and Tess also have struggles pre-swap, of course, but honestly, nothing that really stands out. Anna is struggling a bit with the decision on whether to move or stay, and Tess is shown late in the movie to have a fear of being lonely if the family moves. But these things are not heavily explored.
The main hijink the two young girls, now in the older bodies, use to try and drive a wedge in the marriage is bringing back Jake (Chad Michael Murray) to rekindle his relationship with Anna. But these two young girls have no idea how to flirt, and Jake also seems to still be more interested in Tess than Anna, a carryover from the original film. Meanwhile, Anna and Tess, in the younger girls’ bodies, partake in the timeless tradition of stuffing themselves with as much junk food as possible.
Jacinto is good and dreamy as Eric, but is another victim of the limited screen time per character, as he doesn’t have many moments to be portrayed as anything but the perfect man and husband for Anna.
Harper-as-Anna seems to suck up the most opportunities for realizations from living in her mother’s shoes that other characters don’t seem to get as much of.
So it doesn’t live up to the original, but it still exceeded my expectations for a nostalgia-bait sequel. It’s a warm welcome back for Lohan after so many troubled years and it’s exciting to see if she can rebuild her career. And it’s good to see the reunion of Lohan and Curtis, plus we get Mark Harmon back as Ryan and Ryan Malgarini back (briefly) as Anna’s little brother Harry. We even get back Stephen Tobolowsky as Mr. Bates for a fun scene.
And at the end of the day, you don’t want to miss a chance for a possible Pink Slip reunion.
