Freakier Friday Review
It’s been 22 years since Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsey Lohan swapped bodies which led to a pretty freaky situation taking place. 22 years later those characters are back with another crazy adventure. How is this movie? Is it any good? Let’s talk about it!
The Good
Right out of the gate, the thing to talk about with this film is Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsey Lohan. These two were so much fun together in the 2003 film and they’re having just as much fun in this film. They’re fun when they’re bodies are swapped but also when they’re just their normal selves it’s a lot of fun to see them on screen. With Curtis in particular she’s going for it with this film. She’s clearly excited to be back in this role. When the swap first happens there’s a lot of jokes of her willing to dog on herself about her age, she’s getting older and she looks it. It’s also fun to see Lindsey Lohan back on the big screen again. When you watch Freaky Friday (2003) and Mean Girls (2004) she had these screen presents and movie star charm about her. Despite not being super prominent in films over the last 10-15 years, she returns in this film and is able to capture the spirit and spark she brought to her early 2000s films. With their character before the body swapping takes place, they’re the same characters but at a very different point in life. Their characters are obviously in a much better place because the first film happened that changed their perspective on each other. Their love being either the parent or the grandparent, they’re in a happy place before all of this shenanigans takes place.
From there, the movie is really funny and had me and my audience laughing out loud at multiple points in the film. Of course, a majority of the humor comes from the body swapping shenanigans and high schoolers trying to act like adults or teenagers trying to act like adults. There’s so much situational humor that comes from all of this crazy stuff that takes place, it’s cringy at points but the cringiest fits the film. The two scenes that got the biggest reaction out of my audience was this scene between Lohan and Manny Jacinto’s character early on. The other one was the whole bit when Chad Michael Murray’s character is introduced and they’re at his record store, both Lohan and Curtis get a bunch of moments to be really funny in that scene. All of our swapped characters got several great jokes that had my audience laughing and enjoying themselves from beginning to end. There’s some call back jokes to the original that are nice references for fans of that film. Without spoiling what the joke is, there’s a great Mean Girls reference in here that puts a smile on my face as that's one of my favorite comedies of all time. One of the film’s main goals was to make the audience laugh, based on my screening of the film, it did its job.
As it is Freakier Friday, you have to talk about the body swap situation and what it entails and it’s a lot of fun. It’s a bit more complicated this time around because instead of a mother and daughter swapping it’s a mother, daughter, grandmother, and a step-sister are getting swapped, so that could be a negative for some. For me, I thought it worked well enough and it was a good enough excuse and reason to make another film. The teenagers are more so the stars of the film, they’re the ones that grow, change, and get the big character arcs. Even with the inherent plot and what the film revolves around, I think it makes sense for a sequel that comes 23 years after the original. Like I mentioned earlier, the inherent body swapping gimmick provides just a lot of humor and laughs. Given that it’s more complex and the age gap between Jamie Lee Curtis and the teenagers is much bigger there’s different jokes you can have that aren’t rehashing jokes from the original and the body swap in this context in the year 2025 I thought worked.
Finally this movie delivered everything I expected it to and really nothing more. I mean that as a good thing, I really enjoyed the 2003 film so I was excited to see this film. It wasn’t on any of my most anticipated lists of 2025 or anything like that, but my expectations were met. As a fan of the original, I enjoyed this film a good bit. I think most people will probably fall into that category of having fun with this film, enjoying the characters and the laughs. If that’s what you went to this movie for then I think you’ll be satisfied with what you got.
The Bad
The big thing with this film is the whole plot and the motivation of our teenagers felt very melodramatic. The original film was about this mother and daughter who didn’t understand each other and they swap bodies and by the end of the film they love each other and everything is good now. When you’re doing a sequel you don’t want to just rehash the plot of the original, you want to do something different. I said earlier that the situation that kicks everything in motion I think makes sense and there’s interesting ideas. But the actual tension between the teenagers felt very melodramatic. I know that I’m not the target audience for this film, so it’ll probably work better for the target audience. The whole plot revolves around Lindsey Lohan’s character getting remarried and her family possibly moving to England. The teenage girls when they’re playing Lohan and Curtis are trying to cancel the wedding, they’re kind of trying to ruin their parents’ lives. I’m the son of divorce parents. I have experience with my parents remarrying, but the way that it’s done in this film made you not want to root for these characters and you feel bad for Lindsey Lohan’s character. I wish that they took the idea of a wedding and found a more charming plot to tell this with this film. Like I said, there’s ideas in here that could be interesting, the final execution I didn’t think would work.
Also, the film is 1 hour and 51 minutes long, about 15 minutes longer than the 2003 film and I don’t think it needed to be that long. There’s jokes and bits that I thought went on for too long and some of that could’ve been trimmed down to make some scenes shorter. There’s some jokes at the beginning involving the British teenage girl having this follower that copies everything she says. It’s a funny joke the first time that it happens, but it doesn't really go anywhere. It felt like it’s there to show the audience that the British teenage girl is the pretty popular girl in school. But the film had other ways to show us that, those bits at the beginning I thought could’ve been cut. Mark Harmon’s character feels pointless to the plot. He gets one scene in the third act that’s heartfelt, but that’s really it. The scenes with him in the first half felt like last minute additions to the script because they realized that Harmon didn’t have enough to do. I think the first half could’ve been trimmed by 5-10 minutes to get to things quicker and not make the film nearly 2 hours long.
Lastly, the way that the actual body swapping happens just didn’t come together for me. It took way too long to get going and felt more complex than it needed to be. In the original the body swapping took place because they read fortune cookies, that’s a simple fun answer for what happened. This film involves a palm reader and that entire scene is way too long. Then after the scene happens with Lindsey and Jamie, it switches over to the teenage girls and do something very similar. The explanation was too much and I wish they found a simpler way to go about the body swapping happening again.
Final Thoughts: In general, Freakier Friday is a fun time at the movies. Fans of the 2003 film I think will be very pleased with this film and get a lot of enjoyment out of it. It’s great to see Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsey Lohan together again, both of them are clearly having a lot of fun in the role. There’s some story problems that come from the harshness of the teenagers and the specific body swapping switch in this film didn’t feel as clean or as simple as the original.
The Score: 8.1/10 (B-)
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