‘Freakier Friday’ Review: This uninspired sequel will make you yearn for Monday

PHOENIX (AZFamily) — Fri-yay? Not so much.

Synopsis

22 years since the events of the last film, Freakier Friday follows Tess Coleman (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her now adult, and single, daughter Anna (Lindsay Lohan), who have both agreed to “co-parent” Anna’s teenage daughter Harper (Julia Butters). When Anna meets Eric (Manny Jacinto) and eventually gets engaged to him, this creates drama between her and Harper, especially since her school bully Lily (Sophia Hammons) is Eric’s daughter.

At Anna’s bachelorette party, the conflict comes to a head when fortune teller Madame Jen (Vanessa Bayer) casts a magical body-swapping spell on Anna, Tess, Harper, and Lily. With Harper now in Anna’s body and Lily in Tess’, and Anna in Harper’s body and Tess in Lily’s, the four must work together to break the spell. However, Harper and Lily learn that they have their own plans, as they exploit their newfound adult privileges to break up their parents’ wedding.

My thoughts

I hope all that above made sense. Writing a synopsis for a quadruple body swap movie is difficult, so I can only imagine writing an entire screenplay around the concept. Having to tackle two characters switching places is enough of a task already, as you’re almost writing for four different characters and have to account for their fish-out-of-water POVs. When you now have four characters, in a way making for a total of eight, things really start to get complicated.

The original Freaky Friday concept, and most other body swap movies, are fairly straightforward. It’s the age-old question of, “What if I could swap places with my parents?” and imagining all of the chaos that would come from that. Freakier Friday still has the same concept as the mother and daughter swapping bodies, but you can’t just do the same old thing again when making a legacy sequel all these years later! No, you need to do the same old thing again, but now with two more characters! Think of the possibilities!

Four body problem

Well, I wouldn’t say “possibilities” were the top priority of the team behind Freakier Friday. This isn’t just a legacy sequel, but a Disney legacy sequel that they originally intended to release on Disney+ before Jamie Lee Curtis demanded a theatrical release, and it shows. It has all the hallmarks of a movie made for Disney+, down to literally looking like a Hallmark Channel movie with Matthew Clark’s garish cinematography. The whole movie is just unpleasant on the eyes, with bright, flat, and occasionally overexposed lighting. Just look at the header image of this review. It looks like a Neutrogena ad!

Nisha Ganatra hasn’t directed a theatrical feature film since 2019’s Late Night, mostly working as a director in television. She actually directed the Hallmark movie Pete’s Christmas, so this all tracks with this movie’s Hallmark aesthetic. Ganatra’s direction is just as flat as Clark’s cinematography, giving this the flare you’d expect from such a “made for TV” feeling production, which is none at all. The only time her direction gets interesting is when the camera flies around during the body-swapping scenes, but some of her shot compositions are downright confusing with what they’re trying to convey.

Having four characters swapping bodies with each other only serves to muddy the narrative waters, especially when Anna and Tess don’t really have much to do once they’re in Harper’s and Lily’s bodies. Their scenes at their high school are painfully unfunny, with odd Zucker Brothers-esque moments interspersed throughout. There’s a food fight sequence that feels both out of place and out of touch, featuring a mime running in and pretending to yell “FOOD FIGHT!” right before. A cute idea, but woefully out of place compared to the more grounded humor of the 2003 version.

Talkin’ ‘bout my generation

Look, the 2003 Freaky Friday isn’t the greatest movie ever, but it’s at least charming and fun with a brisk pace that succinctly explores its characters and themes. The back-and-forth structure bouncing between Anna and Tess, literally living each other’s lives with the ticking clock being a wedding the next day, made for not just great comedy, but great tension. It may technically be a supernatural movie with the body swapping, but it still plays out as one would realistically expect.

Freakier Friday simply doesn’t have that same logic or feeling of urgency. The pacing and structure of Jordan Weiss’s screenplay are awful, with scenes either lasting longer than they need to or being abruptly cut off. This movie doesn’t even take place on only Friday, at least I think, because Eleanor Infante’s clunky editing made it hard to grasp what was really going on (perhaps this should have been called Freaky Weekend). From the writing stages at the beginning all the way to the editing booth at the end, this entire project was poorly conceived and executed.

What worked best about the 2003 Freaky Friday is the only bright spot here, which is the principal holding this altogether. In fact, they’re all so good that they momentarily trick you into thinking what you’re watching here has any real dramatic weight. Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan play off each other as well as they did before, with the added bonus of both of them getting to embody the personalities of immature teenagers. As the movie seemingly falls apart at the seams, Curtis and Lohan desperately try to keep it together, having as much fun as they can in the process.

The younger cast members also work well together, with Julia Butters and Sophia Hammons forming solid chemistry. They capably carry the movie along when Curtis and Lohan aren’t onscreen, with both of them getting significant dramatic moments. I was especially impressed with Butters, who went toe to toe with Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, more than holding her own against him. If that doesn’t display how talented she is, she shows her talents here by making the material actually work at times.

Final verdict

Freakier Friday is a nearly identical movie to the 2003 version, down to the recycled plot beats and jokes. “Oh my God! I’m old/young! I have wrinkles/good knees!” They’re all the same old body-swapping jokes you’ve seen dozens of times before. There are some chuckles here and there, with Chad Michael Murray’s returning character, Jake, providing most of them. It’s just when you have hilarious people like Vanessa Bayer and Chloe Fineman not providing a single laugh despite trying their hardest, you know something had to go wrong behind the scenes.

With double the characters, which means double the body-swapping, when I say Freakier Friday is more of the same, I mean that literally. Where it’s not the same movie is when it comes to the quality. I can begrudgingly accept a creatively bankrupt legacy sequel if it’s entertaining and well put together enough, which this is neither. It’s so boring that it’ll make you wish you could swap bodies with anybody not watching this.

My rating: 3.5/10

Freakier Friday is currently playing in theaters nationwide.

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