{"id":867536,"date":"2025-08-23T23:13:57","date_gmt":"2025-08-24T04:13:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/08\/23\/freakier-friday-review-lindsay-lohan-and-jamie-lee-curtis-reunite-for-a-sequel-that-kicks-up-the-body-swap-complications-but-not-the-comedy\/"},"modified":"2025-08-23T23:13:57","modified_gmt":"2025-08-24T04:13:57","slug":"freakier-friday-review-lindsay-lohan-and-jamie-lee-curtis-reunite-for-a-sequel-that-kicks-up-the-body-swap-complications-but-not-the-comedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/08\/23\/freakier-friday-review-lindsay-lohan-and-jamie-lee-curtis-reunite-for-a-sequel-that-kicks-up-the-body-swap-complications-but-not-the-comedy\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Freakier Friday\u2019 Review: Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis Reunite for a Sequel That Kicks Up the Body-Swap Complications\u00a0but Not the Comedy"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\n\tA body-swap comedy, when it\u2019s really cooking, is built on a device that won\u2019t quit. An actor, generally an adult, pretends to be inhabited by someone totally different from him or herself (generally a kid). The comedy that emerges is trip-wired with slapstick psychology \u2014 you feel like you\u2019re looking at an actor but can just about see<\/em> the person hidden inside. In \u201cBig,\u201d the \u201cCitizen Kane\u201d of the genre, Tom Hanks didn\u2019t just mimic the gestures and wide-eyed aura of an eager 13-year-old; he seemed to be entering the kid\u2019s soul, a feat of acting at once hilarious and enchanting. Jennifer Garner did much the same thing in \u201c13 Going on 30\u201d (one of the most inspired comedies of the 2000s), and so, in a less elevated way, did Jamie Lee Curtis<\/a> in the 2003 remake of \u201cFreaky Friday\u201d \u2014 as did Lindsay Lohan<\/a>, who in her witty fashion played someone channeling an older character (her mom!) with a kind of perfect stodgy aplomb.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cFreakier Friday<\/a>\u201d doubles the body swaps \u2014 and, in theory, the comedy complications. Lohan\u2019s Anna is now a single mother with a teenage daughter, Harper (Julia Butters, that breakout girl from \u201cOnce Upon a Time in Hollywood\u201d). At Harper\u2019s high school, Anna meets Eric (Manny Jacinto), a sexy widower from London with a daughter of his own: Lily (Sophia Hammons), who\u2019s a mean-girl fashionista. She and Harper are not exactly fast friends. But when Anna and Eric get engaged, the two girls are suddenly faced with the prospect of becoming stepsisters.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\tPopular on Variety\t\t<\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\n\tThis looks like it could shape up into a family from hell. That\u2019s why the only thing that can save it is a double-tiered body swap, which the film\u2019s director, Nisha Ganatra (\u201cLate Night\u201d), engineers without much pretense of fantasy explanation (it all hinges on a daffy psychic, played by Vanessa Bayer, hidden behind a soda machine). As soon as the magic happens, Anna and Harper have switched places: a mother-daughter swap that directly echoes the one in the first film. But upping the ante is a second swap: Lily, the mean girl, lands in the body of Jamie Lee Curtis\u2019s Tess, who is Harper\u2019s grandma (but practically her second parent), while Tess is taken over by the abrasive Brit-snob spitfire Lily.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe stage is set for an even wilder comedy than \u201cFreaky Friday.\u201d Yet somehow it doesn\u2019t quite happen that way. What we\u2019re longing to see is that inside-out performative magic, the irrepressible primal comedy of an actor playing a character who\u2019s literally channeling someone else. We want to feel<\/em> that body-swap tension. But in \u201cFreakier Friday\u201d this plays out in a weirdly limited way, and for a confluence of reasons.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s no insult to Lindsay Lohan to say that she has retained a girlish aura; that\u2019s part of her millennial appeal. Whereas Julia Butters, who plays her daughter, acts with the wise-beyond-her-years precociousness of a Zoomer who\u2019s got everything figured out (at least in her head). The result is that these two, as personalities, aren\u2019t that far apart<\/em>. So when they turn into each other, there\u2019s actually very little comic frisson.<\/p>\n

\n\tA different problem bedevils the second swap. Lily, as played by Sophia Hammons, has a distinctive snappish downbeat British-princess personality; some of it is her accent, some of it her entitled \u2018tude. But that\u2019s what we want to see transferred into Jamie Lee Curtis. And vice versa: Tess, with her spiky but cuddly grandmotherly aura, would be the perfect interior foil to Lily\u2019s outward haughtiness.<\/p>\n

\n\tHere\u2019s what happens instead: Lily, even after the body swap, keeps speaking in her British accent (is the movie saying that accents are somehow part of a person\u2019s physical<\/em> make-up?); she seems like the same person she was before. If Curtis could have used that accent as part of her performance, it would have been much funnier, but instead she\u2019s stuck playing Lily as a fount of generic bratty attitude, which merges with Tess\u2019s own elderly brattiness. The bottom line is that none of these characters, after the swap, seem different enough from themselves to allow the comedy to detonate.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat said, the double swap lends \u201cFreakier Friday\u201d a juggling-balls-in-the-air quality that gives off a pleasant hum. It\u2019s fun to ride the film\u2019s complications; it follows through on its own logic just enough to create a watchably friendly Disney landscape. And there are a few scattered moments when the laughs break free: Lohan, as Harper, attempting to flirt with the man she thinks is her mother\u2019s secret boyfriend or greeting Anna\u2019s assistants with a cheerful \u201cHello, staff of people I see all the time!,\u201d<\/em> Curtis\u2019s Lily shopping for old-age products in a drugstore.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe movie winds up being rather touching. It\u2019s all about how Harper and Lily, in trying to break up their parents\u2019 engagement, discover that they really do want to be sisters, and it\u2019s about how Harper learns that her mom has been looking out for her in ways she had no idea of. Anna, the former leader of the rock band Pink Slip, is now the manager of Ella (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), a global pop star, but she\u2019s been writing songs on the sly. And it takes Harper\u2019s yearning energy to bring all of that to the surface. \u201cFreakier Friday\u201d scores as skewed Disney family fairy tale. It just doesn\u2019t score as rollicking Rube Goldberg personality-transplant comedy. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Owen Gleiberman
Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A body-swap comedy, when it\u2019s really cooking, is built on a device that won\u2019t quit. An actor, generally an adult, pretends to be inhabited by someone totally different from him or herself (generally a kid). The comedy that emerges is trip-wired with slapstick psychology \u2014 you feel like you\u2019re looking at an actor but can<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":867537,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[145780,1415],"tags":[145779,8656],"class_list":{"0":"post-867536","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-freakier","8":"category-friday","9":"tag-freakier","10":"tag-friday"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/867536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=867536"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/867536\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/867537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=867536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=867536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=867536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}