It’s been 22 years since the release of “Freaky Friday”, said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times. In that film, Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan played a mother and her teenage daughter who – owing to supernatural intervention – accidentally swapped bodies for 24 hours.
This belated sequel, reuniting its original stars, picks things up in the present day: Tess (Curtis) is still working as a therapist; Anna (Lohan) is now grown up and the single mother of a teenage daughter of her own – rebellious surf-loving Harper (Julia Butters).
All is “hunky dory” until Anna falls for a British chef (Manny Jacinto), whose “snooty” daughter Lily (Sophia Hammons) is Harper’s rival at school. Then, following an encounter with a psychic at Anna’s hen night, the curse is repeated, except this time the body swap is four-way: Anna wakes up to find herself in her daughter’s body, while Tess swaps with Lily.
It’s confusing, but if you remember that everyone is playing the opposite of their own age, that helps.
One of the pleasures of body-swap films is watching the actors perform as each other, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent, so it is a shame that though Butters does a great job imitating Lohan’s mannerisms, Lohan and Curtis just opt for “generic immaturity”.
On the contrary, said Dana Stevens on Slate – embodying a teenager allows Curtis to “bust out” that talent for physical comedy that is one of her hallmarks. She conveys both the freedom that youngsters on the cusp of adulthood feel and the horror any teenager would display if they looked in the mirror and saw reflected back at them the face of someone else’s grandmother.
It’s not a great film: it is uneven, and neither as funny nor as well plotted as the 2003 version. But it is quite “endearing”, and it has some great moments.
Mother-and-daughter comedy returns with four characters switching bodies
