Crew
Director – Nisha Ganatra, Screenplay – Jordan Weiss, Story – Elyse Hollander & Jordan Weiss, Producers – Kristin Burr, Andrew Gunn & Jamie Lee Curtis, Photography – Matthew Clark, Music – Amie Doherty, Visual Effects – Crafty Apes (Supervisor – Alex Knudsen), Lola | VFX & Opsis (Supervisor – Justin Jones), Makeup Effects Design – Christopher Nelson, Production Design – Kay Lee. Production Company – Disney/Gunn Films/Burr! Productions.
Cast
Jamie Lee Curtis (Tess Coleman), Lindsay Lohan (Anna Coleman), Julia Butters (Harper Coleman), Sophia Hammons (Lily Reyes), Manny Jacinto (Eric Reyes), Mark Harmon (Ryan), Maitreyi Ramakrishnan (Ella), Chad Michael Murray (Jake), X Mayo (Principal Waldman), Vanessa Bayer (Madame Jen), Lucille Soong (Grandma Chiang), Rosalind Chao (Mama P)
Plot
Tess Coleman has become a successful podcaster and author. Her daughter Anna has a career in the music industry and is raising a daughter of her own, the now teenage Harper. Harper argues in class with her lab partner, the British Lily Reyes, and ends up causing a lab accident. After being called in to the principal’s office, Anna and Lily’s father Eric are attracted, go out and soon announce plans to marry. This creates a conflict as Harper does not want to give up living in L.A. to have to move to England. A fortune teller tells the fortunes of Tess and Anna and then Harper and Lily and afterwards an earthquake occurs. The next morning, the four wake up to find they are in each other’s bodies – Anna and Harper have swapped bodies and Tess and Lily with each other. The four are forced to negotiate school and professional lives while posing as the others. While in her mother’s body, Harper seeks to sabotage the plans for the wedding so that she doesn’t have to move to England.
Freaky Friday (2003) was one of the more likeable of the Disney remakes of the 2000s. It was based on the earlier Freaky Friday (1976), adapted from the 1972 children’s story of the same name by Mary Rodgers. In the original, Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster were cast as mother and daughter who ended up swapping into each other’s bodies. The remake had Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan as mother and daughter with both giving inspired comedy performances. In between, there had been another remake with the tv movie Freaky Friday (1995) with Shelley Long and Gaby Hoffmann as mother and daughter. And subsequent to the 2003 film, the story was adapted as an off-Broadway musical in 2016 and this then filmed as a further remake Freaky Friday (2018) for the Disney Channel with Heidi Blickenstaff and Cozi Zuehlsdorff as mother and daughter.
Disney’s business model in the 2010s and 2020s has been to wring every possible piece of blood from a pre-existing IP. Thus Disney make a sequel to the 2003 film with Freakier Friday. Apparently, this was at the behest of Jamie Lee Curtis who persuaded executives to revive the property and brought Lindsay Lohan and most of the other cast from the 2003 film back on board.
The twenty-two-year gap has moved Freaky Friday over into a new generation. In the original, Lindsay Lohan was a rebellious teenager, whereas now she becomes a solo mother with her own rebellious teenage daughter. In the original, Jamie Lee Curtis was the one planning on getting married, whereas here it is Lindsay who meets someone and makes plans to get married. In 2003, Freaky Friday brought Jamie Lee back into the spotlight after a few years on the backburner, while Lindsay Lohan was a young talent in the process of going places. Now both actresses have almost swapped positions. At 66, Jamie Lee has passed mandatory retirement age in most countries but is enjoying a career resurgence with Halloween (2018) and sequels and winning an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress for Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). In 2003, Lindsay Lohan was someone full of promise and talent but subsequently became a bad tabloid headline for her party girl outrages. In the last few years, she has all but disappeared from the celebrity and acting radar – in fact, she moved to Dubai in 2014 – and Freakier Friday was her first theatrical release in twelve years.
I enjoyed the 2003 Freaky Friday far more than I was expecting to. I can’t say I had the same feelings when more or less the same elements were assembled together again here. There is a feeling of unnecessariness to Freakier Friday. It feels just like when The Asylum the followed 2-Headed Shark Attack (2012) up with sequels where they just kept adding heads until they reached 6-Headed Shark Attack (2018). The concept of mother-daughter bodyswap worked the first time so now we get more heads with a fourway bodyswap between mother, daughter, granddaughter and prospective granddaughter-in-law. Like the recent bodyswap film It’s What’s Inside (2024), the profusion of bodies swapped makes it confusing trying to work out which actress is meant to be playing which character in almost every scene.
In the 2003 film, Jamie Lee and Lindsay struck up a great comic rapport that made the film much more than the lightweight effort it otherwise would have been. There is not that same inspired touch here. The junior additions to the quartet, Julia Butters and Sophia Hammons, just don’t have that lightness of touch or any real comic timing and fade into instant forgettability. Jamie Lee gives it her best and is often a live wire among the show. The moment Lindsay Lohan became a celebrity she seemed to give up on making an effort in any of her films and similarly here delivers her performance largely on autopilot. As with the 2018 remake, there is the tendency to fill the male romantic lead out with an actor for diversity purposes – in this case, Filipino Canadian actor Manny Jacinto who for some reason tries to convince us he is British – and he ends up sparking next to no conviction in his romantic scenes with Lindsay Lohan.
The truth though is that the selection of a new director in Nisha Ganatra, who has made a handful of comedy films with Chutney Popcorn (1999), Cake (2005), Late Night (2019) and others, including the fantasy tv pilot The Hunters (2013) and quite a bit of episodic tv, is uninspired. The comedy routines have a banal insipidity – this is a film that thinks it is hilarious to turn a scene with the girls bickering at school into a massed food fight that climaxes in the custard pieing of the school principal X Mayo. The original film had a broad appeal, whereas this is a film that feels like it is making a pitch very much to the teenage girl audience – it even co-opts poppy MTV styled visuals at various points. The film’s banal feelgood celebrations of motherly togetherness at the end – even an end credit tribute to the filmmakers’ mothers – is also a treacly addition that the original never had.
Trailer here