It’s adorable that Jamie Lee Curtis spent some of her Oscar-winner capital rejoining Lindsay Lohan for another round of “Freaky Friday” body-switching hijinx. And it’s grand that Lohan survived her most problematic years and that Netflix brought her career back from the dead giving her the option of making this Disney sequel.
For a few moments here and there, the manic giddiness of our leads, revisiting roles from 2003, overwhelms the warm, fuzzy nostalgia of “Freakier Friday,” a movie that puts these two, and one’s daughter and soon-to-be-stepdaughter through that “see the world from your point of view” body-switching thing that the story hangs on.
No, the movie never shakes the feeling that this should have been a direct-to-Disney+ project, despite Curtis winning an Oscar and thus meriting more attention and buzz than it would have otherwise had.
The two new kids (Julia Butters and Sophia Hammons) never quite stick the landing or hold their own with the two old pros. One (Hammons) has a British accent, which she can’t shake when she switches bodies with therapist Grandma Tess (Curtis). And Curtis throwing up her hands at doing the teen’s accent — she’s a British baroness by marriage, for Pete’s sake — really lowers the bar on the entire enterprise.
But there are “old lady” giggles which Curtis leans into, the indignity of having her body inhabited by a confused, callow British high-school expat.
“Why do I have to PEE again?” “What’s WITH all the old tissues in EVERY pocket?”
And Lohan finds the fun in having a teen take over her former teen idol body, a kid trying to learn how to vamp and “flirt” with a 40ish old flame (Chad Michael Murray), a onetime pop starlet who became a talent manager who now relates to her teen idol client (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) better than Mom ever will.
The plot this time around has teen surfer Jordan (Butters, of “The Fabelmans”) resenting onetime-rocker Mom’s love connection to a British restaurateur (Manny Jacincto of “Top Gun: Maverick”). Because she’s in high school with his snobby, posh daughter Lily (Hammons), and they can’t stand each other.
And when they get married, surf-or-die Harper would have to move to London.
Mom’s impending nuptials and granny’s psychotherapist/podcaster interventions don’t get those two together. But the wacky “psychic” (“SNL” alumna Vanessa Bayer) at mom’s bachelorette party senses mom Anna’s and granny’s onetime “switch,” and casts a spell that could impact the kids in the same way.
It does.
Mark Harmon returns, as Tess’s now pickleball-obsessed husband, along with Murray as onetime teen rocker Anna’s crush, the one the body-switched teens try to use to bust up the coming wedding. And Stephen Tobolowsky is back as a teacher not shy about putting the older women in younger girls’ bodies through a stretch of high school hard labor.
But the script isn’t much and the direction — save for a spirited high school bake sale food fight — is lackluster.
And watching Curtis hurl herself at shopping for old age remedies at the drug store, with Lohan straining to keep up, to compensate for the thin entertainment value here can only carry “Freakier” so far, and that leaves us somewhat short of the finish line when all is said and done.
Laughed at the geezer gags. Loved the fact that they chose to do it. Wish they’d held out for a better script.
Rating: PG, the odd bit of rude humor
Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Lindsay Lohan, Julia Butters, Sophia Hammons,
Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Chad Michael Murray, Eric Reyes Vanessa Bayer, Stephen Tobolowsky and Mark Harmon.
Credits: Directed by Nisha Ganatra, scripted by Jordan Weiss, based on a book by Mary Rodgers and movie characters created by Leslie Dixon and Heather Hach. A Disney release.
Running time: 1:51
