Freakier Friday (2025)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Rarely, anymore, does a leading comedic duo make their cinematic outing truly worth it. Admittedly, I'm the exact target audience for a Freaky Friday legacy sequel, twenty-two years after the smash teen Disney comedy, nobody could contest that watching Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan doing all this again and clearly having the time of their lives is anything less than magical. They could be sitting on a sofa giving interviews and it would be entertaining, but here we're given a story that has enough fun twisting and building off the original to work as a reasonably coherent and cohesive film on its own merit. The nonsense -- and I mean a lot of it -- works for us simply because of Curtis and Lohan.

Being concerned the night before this screening, I rewatched the original and found myself enchanted all over again. Yet I needn't have worried; Freakier Friday is narratively similar to the original, simply scaffolded with a secondary level of freakiness. That is to say that Curtis and Lohan, the now-aged mother and daughter, do indeed switch bodies, but not with each other. Lohan's daughter and soon-to-be stepdaughter are pulled into the mix, adding a new generation to the equation. This isn't the kind of material that needed the unnecessary chaos and double trouble, and I struggled more than once to marry Curtis, especially, to her new personality. 

Director Nisha Ganatra (Late Night, The High Note, Transparent) embraces the chaos and makes a compelling case for both simplicity in comedy and gracious direction that allows its performers to breathe. She wisely lets Curtis and Lohan ham it up, catching their charm with seeming patience and a hesitance to force it. That may not be entirely fair, because it is still a Disney comedy of a particular millennial appeal, and the somewhat sitcom style is by definition forced. But I never felt manipulated out of my comfort zone into sensing joy in this film; maybe some laughs and surprises were spliced in, but my enjoyment was constant.

Well, mostly constant. Scenes revolving around the teenagers (Julia Butters of The Fabelmans and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Sophia Hammons) are mostly obnoxious and strange, and I found their characters woefully underwritten and mostly dull. It doesn't help that the young performers are simply not up to the task of emulating stars with the emotive powers of Curtis and Lohan; they feel and sound flat and annoyed, not a helpful combination, and a big letdown from the rollicking scenes of their counterparts acting fools. Even the mere sight gag of Curtis with lip plumper has been branded to my funny bone.

Narratively straightforward and with few real surprises, there's not much of note apart from the leads and the general production design, which gorgeously evokes the candy-colored vibes of the original. A bizarre and endlessly repeated mantra from a psychic (Vanessa Bayer of SNL, who really deserved a better-written character) sets off the mania this time around, though the Chinese mother and daughter from the first one return for some cute screentime. Manny Jacinto as Lohan's fiancee does his best with the role, but he's a suspiciously perfect man, even to a fault, which also makes him rather boring. Chad Michael Murray returns in arrestingly glorious fashion, and his flirtation with Curtis is a highlight.

Think about the film too much, and its magic dissipates. Like the accent issue between Curtis and her body-swapping partner. Or like the casting choice for a teenager who plays older very well and an adult woman who miraculously still exudes the twentysomething energy that made her famous; swapped, they're really not far off from what we have already seen of each of themselves. But in its surface pleasures, Freakier Friday is a touching homage to nostalgia and enthusiasm in family films. Perhaps more importantly, it shows a remarkable return to form from a very classy Lohan, whose aura in this film feels so healing and genuine that it's hard to separate the real woman from the character. I look forward to the day when she gets some really meaty material to claim as the bona fide actor I suspect she's waiting to reveal. In the meantime, this might be my favorite of the Disney late-sequels of live action films yet, and it's all because of Curtis and Lohan.