Given its simply understood, arguably irresistible, one-and-done body-swap premise, Freaky Friday, the 2003 adaptation of Mary Rodgers’s 1972 children’s novel, wasn’t exactly ripe for a sequel, nor was anyone besides co-stars Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan, their respective talent managers/agents, or the rights-holders clamoring for a follow-up, but here we are, individually and collectively, more than two decades later, not to mention two decades older (and grayer), facing the prospect of a Curtis and Lohan reunion onscreen and all that apparently entails.
With twice the number of body-swaps (four characters instead of two) than its predecessor, Freakier Friday hurtles mother and daughter, Tess and Anna Coleman (Curtis and Lohan, respectively), headfirst into the present day. While Tess, a therapist by trade, has turned to podcasting to get the word out about mental health and parenting, she’s also a bestseller self-help author. Anna has left her rock career behind for managing the career of a Gen Z pop-star, Ella (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), and single motherhood to Harper (Julia Butters, The Fablemans, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), a high-schooler, surface-deep rebel and occasional surfer.
Along with Tess’s retired husband, Ryan (Mark Harmon in super-chill mode), Tess and Anna co-parent Harper, to varying, often frustrating levels of success, butting heads over how to handle Harper’s rebellious streak (one prefers permissiveness, the other, some semblance of structure). Their somewhat stable co-parenting arrangement, however, comes under almost immediately stress after Anna meets Eric Reyes (Manny Jacinto), a widowed British chef new to Los Angeles, and his snobby, elitist daughter, Lily (Sophia Hammons). Anna and Eric meet at an emergency parent-teacher conference to discuss Harper and Lily’s combative, oppositional behavior during a chemistry class.
While Anna and Eric engage in a whirlwind, montage-ready, six-month romance that leads to a marriage proposal and subsequently, marriage itself, Harper and Lily can’t reconcile themselves to the idea of a newly blended family or even where the new family should reside (Los Angeles or London), out of a combination of egocentrism, egotism, and in Lily’s case, unresolved feelings about the loss of her biological mother to an unspecified illness only a year or two earlier.
All those tangled, complicated feelings and emotions should lead the previously mentioned characters to four- or even five-way family therapy to sort things out and move on with their lives, but in the fantasy world of the Freaky Friday series, it leads to a four-way body-swap. Tess swaps places with the decades-younger Lily, Anna swaps places with Harper, mirroring her own swap two decades earlier, and something less than full-on hilarity ensues for Freakier Friday’s slightly bloated running time.
The double swap ensures Freakier Friday splits into two, more or less separate storylines as Tess and Anna, now in teen bodies, have to navigate the pitfalls of high-school life. In turn, Harper and Lily must play grown-up, Harper managing the mercurial Ella through a public meltdown of a breakup with her latest pop-star beau, Tess supposedly prepping for a national book tour, both eager to use their newfound adult bodies to break up Anna and Eric’s upcoming nuptials (e.g., canceling caterers, tanking an immigration interview, bringing Anna’s old beau back into the mix).
Aa Freakier Friday stumbles towards its preordained resolution (peace, love, and understanding), the over-convoluted plot puts the characters through a series of sketch-like scenes involving an uneven mix of physical and verbal humor.. Tess and Lily have to navigate not just Ella’s many moods, but a video shoot as well. Once they’ve decided to actively scuttle Anna and Eric’s wedding, they pursue Anna’s old boyfriend, Jake (Chad Michael Murray), hoping to rekindle a long extinguished romance.
Slickly directed by Nisha Ganatra (The High Note, Late Night, Chutney Popcorn) from an overstuffed screenplay credited to Jordan Weiss and Elyse Hollander, Freakier Friday asks little from its audience except surface-deep engagement and sometimes delivers even less, especially when Lily-as-Tess stumbles through one too many ableist, ageist jokes, under-utilizes Anna and Tess as part of the Gen Alpha cohort, or repeatedly adopts the most reductive approach to humor.
Still, Ganatra and her collaborators understand that the combination of a talented, game cast and their chemistry together goes a long way toward audiences overlooking its story- and humor-based shortcomings and embracing its fantasy leanings where perseverance, communication, and mutual respect can heal even the most frayed of family relationships.
Freakier Friday opens theatrically on Friday, August 8th, via Walt Disney Pictures.
