Freaky Friday is back after over two decades since we last saw Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan swap bodies thanks to a suitably freaky family curse. However, Disney’s new follow-up, in theaters this week, leaning heavily on the charms of a stellar ensemble, is a sequel constantly threatening to fall apart under the weight of uneven execution.
In Freaky Fridayit was just mother Tess Coleman (Curtis) and her daughter Anna (Lohan) who swapped bodies, a kooky way for mother and child to better understand each other and come to terms with their respective journeys in life. In Freakierdirected by Nisha Ganatra, Ana is now all grown up herself with a teen daughter (Harper, played by Julia Butters) and ready to marry the father of said daughter’s high school nemesis (Eric and Lily, played by Manny Jacinto and Sophia Hammons, respectively). While Tess attempts to help glue the new family dynamic together, plenty of interesting cracks form among all the different relationships as they prepare to adapt to this new normal.
Which is where, of course, the Coleman family curse triggers, hitting Anna, Tess, Harper, and Lily. With more body swaps this time around, things get convoluted quickly. Lohan is now playing Harper in Anna’s body, while Curtis plays step-sister Lily, and the duo seamlessly falls back in step with one another as they did 22 years ago. They really shine through some of the film’s silliest hijinks, even if the setup to those slapstick moments feels nonsensical, even for a comedy. When Lohan and Curtis get to play, however, they give some much-needed depth and heart to the core of the film.
Lohan likewise gets to lean into her romantic comedy sensibilities opposite Jacinto, and they make for a sizzling pairing, both in the comedic moments and in the more touching family relationship drama—it’s just a shame that there isn’t enough of them together in the film to mine that chemistry for all its worth. It takes Freakier far too long to really let us get to know the newcomers in Eric and Lily, their arrival undercut by needlessly overcomplicating Anna’s backstory, covering the time between the two films with former high school drama.
And that’s kind of Freakier‘s big problem: it feels overstuffed in a lot of ways. Many gags go on for just a bit too long, even before the film digs into body-switching shenanigans, and a lot of the comedy, especially between the two teens, feels more like adults trying to write Gen Z kids rather than feeling particularly contemporary. Butters and Hammons are definitely underserved, having to play Tess and Anna in their teen bodies compared to the other half of the body-swapping drama—Freakier just wastes them until the final act, but it comes too suddenly and too late in the game to have any impact.
That overstuffing definitely hits hardest in Anna’s arc in the film, having to balance solo-parenting her daughter with her career managing an upcoming music artist, Ella (the scene-stealing Maitreyi Ramakrishnan). There’s just too much going on that the film never does justice to, especially when it comes to why Anna left behind her own musical career with Pinkslip. For a comedy that also happens to run nearly two hours long, Freakier feels like it has too many characters in the mix, leaving so many of them (and the film’s gags) getting short-changed trying to balance it all.
What is most frustrating is that Freakier‘s smart updates to the body-swapping “lore,” combined with the ensemble cast’s chemistry selling it all in the first place, really work, only for the film itself to buckle under stereotypical constraints of the comedy genre. It’s a movie that feels like someone kept interfering to add more jokes, throwing off the vibe of the film (alongside some questionable soundtrack choices, including not one, but two Chappell Roan needle drops that really just make it feel like someone realized she was having her moment last year and were needed to make the film feel contemporary).
The sheer force of Lohan and Curtis’ dynamic getting to return to these characters brings some appeal to Freakier Friday (as do Manny Jacinto’s charms and arms), but it’s only barely enough to make up for the film’s messy, overstuffed feeling, making this long-awaited return more of a Forgettable Friday than a particularly Freaky one.
Freakier Friday hits theaters August 8.
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