‘Freakier Friday’ offers mixed doubles with mixed results
“Freakier Friday” — 2.5 stars
More frantic than funny but sweet in its plastic Disney way, “Freakier Friday” will be a welcome and effective date movie for mothers, daughters, grandmothers and anyone else who had the 2003 “Freaky Friday” on heavy DVD rotation with “Mean Girls” in the first years of the new millennium. All other audiences are warned away, including aging boomers nostalgic for the 1976 Jodie Foster-Barbara Harris original film or Mary Rodgers’ 1972 book. Directed by Nisha Ganatra (“Late Night,” “The High Note”), the new sequel tries to double the pleasure of the “Freaky Friday” concept, but it only fitfully doubles the fun.
You may rightfully wonder who asked for this movie, and the answer would be Jamie Lee Curtis, who by all reports is the prime mover behind “Freakier Friday” getting made and the sole reason for non-“Freaky Friday” diehards to pay attention. That extra half-star at the top of this review? That’s for Curtis.
She once again plays Tess Coleman, bestselling L.A. psychiatrist, mother of Anna (Lindsay Lohan) and now grandmother to teenage Harper (Julia Butters), who is as surly, if not surlier, than Lohan’s Anna was in the 2003 film. Harper has reason to surl, since her mother is marrying British chef Eric Davies (Manny Jacinto of TV’s “The Good Place”), the father of Harper’s Worst Enemy Forever, Lily (Sophia Hammons). Harper is a chill surfer girl, Lily a snooty fashionista, and the idea of them being stepsisters is, like, the worst.
Anna’s bachelorette party includes a booth with a part-time psychic (Vanessa Bayer, late of “Saturday Night Live,” deathly unfunny here), who somehow casts the hoodoo that prompts the film’s necessary magic act. Only this time, Tess and Lily switch bodies in addition to Anna and Harper exchanging theirs. No, it doesn’t make sense, and, yes, it’s confusing trying to remember which actress is playing whom. (Why Tess holds on to Lily’s British phrasing but not her accent remains a mystery.)
“Freakier Friday” also quadruples down on Curtis’ famous line from the first remake (“I’m like the Crypt Keeper!”) by letting Lily-as-Tess do three or four more in the same spirit, some of which will truly hit home with the movie’s target audience. (“I’m Eileen Fisher years old!” Tess moans.) And while the jokes about young people experiencing old people’s arthritis and vice versa are predictable, the cast sells it with gusto. A scene of Anna-as-Harper and Tess-as-Lily pigging out on junk food for the first time in decades is an easy gag but a good one.
As in the earlier movies, the comedy comes from sending the old folks in young bodies to high school and the young folks in old bodies to their jobs. Anna has retired her teenage rock-and-roll-performing dreams to become a record executive and manager to Ella (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), a pop star having a post-breakup meltdown that Harper and Lily can relate to even in grown-up bodies. By contrast, Tess’ argumentativeness in Lily’s body only puts her in the crosshairs of punitive high school teacher Mr. Bates (Stephen Tobolowsky).
A much-loved character actor (“Ned Ryerson? Bing!”), Tobolowsky is a welcome returnee from the 2003 movie, as is Mark Harmon as Tess’ husband, Ryan, and Chad Michael Murray as Jake, the onetime teen hunkalunk now managing a record store and whom Harper and Lily (as Anna and Tess) try to enlist in breaking up Anna’s engagement. Why Murray is here is never really clear — in a few scenes, Jake seems to be hitting on Grandma Tess, which, OK, let’s go there. (The movie doesn’t.) But the male characters are, as ever, secondary in “Freaky Friday”-land.
That’s not a criticism, because this is a story of women bonding across generations and corporeal experiences, just with a lot of slapstick and silly dialogue. Some audiences will doubtless show up to gawk at Lohan, undertaking her first major role in years; the onetime teen star and subsequent tabloid fixture holds the screen and rides the comedy as capably as before (if noticeably cosmetically enhanced). Hammons is fine as Lily, but leaving her dramatically in the dust is Butters, whom you may remember as the precocious child actor cheering up Leonardo DiCaprio in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” or as the youngest daughter on TV’s “American Housewife.” Butters is the real deal, and she makes Harper’s pro forma anger and hurt feel more truthful than this movie really requires.
Then there’s Curtis, for whom the letting down of hair and playing to the balcony has become a brand. It’s the acting equivalent of those older women who have run out of, uh, fudge to give, and it won her an Oscar in “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and let her drive a car through a kitchen on “The Bear.”
Overacting becomes Curtis, as does physical comedy, and as Tess and then Lily-as-Tess, she dresses funny, mugs shamelessly and has a high old time while still hitting the necessary emotional marks. “Freakier Friday” is an inoffensive product with good intentions and a cardboard heart, but, these days, watching Curtis strut her stuff is an out-of-body experience all on its own.
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Rated PG for thematic elements, rude humor, language and some suggestive references. 111 minutes.