How much nostalgia is too much nostalgia? Answers will vary, but the limit is probably somewhere around “four-way body swap”. Twenty-two years after Freaky Friday, Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan are back for Freakier Friday, featuring another round of mother-daughter mystic tomfoolery, only this time they’re joined by a new teenaged cast including Julia Butters and Sophia Hammons, and they’re in for a multi-generational body swap. 

 

Freakier Friday comes from director Nisha Ganatra (taking over from Mark Waters, who directed the 2003 film), and screenwriter Jordan Weiss (from a story by Weiss and Elyse Hollander). The original core cast returns, with Curtis and Lohan reprising their roles as mother-daughter pair Tess and Anna, respectively. They are joined by Mark Harmon as Ryan, Tess’s husband and Anna’s step-father; Ryan Malgarini as Harry, Anna’s younger brother; Chad Michael Murray as Jake, Anna’s high-school boyfriend; Stephen Tobolowsky as a high school teacher; and Rosalind Chao and Lucille Song as Pei-Pei and her mother, respectively, because this franchise can’t quite let go of that old naughty-aughties racism, and the stereotypical Chinese ladies are needed to weigh in on the mystical happenings. 

 

The new cast includes Vanessa Bayer as a kooky palm reader; Julia Butters as Harper, Anna’s daughter; Manny Jacinto as Eric, Anna’s fiancé; and Sophia Hammons as Lily, Eric’s daughter and Anna’s prospective stepdaughter. Two problems: Harper and Lily hate each other, and Manny Jacinto and Sophia Hammons cannot do decent English accents. Manny Jacinto makes for a dashing romantic lead, it’s no wonder Anna will risk the ire of her daughter to marry Eric, but he cannot do a passable English accent, and one wonders why they didn’t just cast English actors to play Eric and Lily. The related plot point is that Harper fears moving to London and Lily doesn’t want to stay in Los Angeles, but like, they could just be from New York. Why London? You didn’t have to do this to yourself, Freakier Friday.

 

Do you feel like you need an org chart to follow all that? Well buckle up, because Freakier Friday follows the sequel maxim of “more is more” and introduces a four-way body swap. After having their palms read, teenagers Harper and Lily switch bodies with Millennial mom Anna and Boomer grandma Tess. Anna and Harper switch places as mother and daughter, and Tess switches places with Lily, her soon-to-be step-granddaughter. Does that seem kind of like a reach and a thin excuse to keep Jamie Lee Curtis involved? It is! Once they’ve traded places, Harper and Lily, with the privilege of adult bodies, scheme to break up Anna and Eric, while Anna and Tess learn new lessons about Gen Z teen life. To change back to normal, they all have to learn lessons about family and not being brats to one another.

 

While Curtis and Lohan retain their body swap performance magic—especially Curtis, who is 1) having the time of her life and 2) giving a legitimately great performance as Tess/Lily—unfortunately, Butters and Hammons aren’t matching their energy. Their dual performances aren’t as engaging or fun, and as a character, Lily is borderline detestable. That kid doesn’t need a magical life lesson, she needs years of therapy to unpack her whole deal. Curtis manages to force a little verve and interest into the character during her time playing Lily, but she can’t quite fix Lily’s innately poor characterization. It’s not just Lily and Eric misunderstanding each other across generational lines, she’s actively sabotaging her father’s happiness, something that probably requires more than a mere apology to fix. But the film devotes very little time to healing Eric and Lily’s rift, because it’s really just a second thought to the mechanics justifying the four-way body swap.

 

Freakier Friday is a nostalgia-baiting sequel, but worse, almost everyone treats it like nothing more than nostalgia-baiting sequel, just another legacy sequel cash grab that no one is trying to make look or feel like anything other than a legacy sequel cash grab. It also just looks plain bad, cheap and weirdly rushed for a sequel two decades in the making. Compare this to The Naked Gun, also a legacy sequel, but one that endeavors to be its own thing and actually looks like a real movie. Curtis and Lohan are the exceptions, but there’s a flatness to the whole movie that brings the energy down. Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis remain charming as ever, but everything around them is drab and undercooked—everything about Freakier Friday feels secondhand and reheated, an exercise in nostalgia and nothing more.

Freakier Friday is now playing exclusively in theaters.

Photo credits: Disney

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