Millennials had it good. We grew up in an age with a sea of teen movies all geared towards helping us grow and communicate with each other and our parents. Like the 2003 Freaky Friday remake. Now, Freakier Friday is giving that to a new generation.
Anna (Lindsay Lohan) and her mother Tess (Jamie Lee Curtis) know what not talking about their issues can do. But when Harper (Julia Butters) and Lily (Sophia Hammons) want to try to break their parents up, the same old chaos that Anna and Tess know comes back into their lives. Anna is getting ready to marry Eric (Manny Jacinto), whose daughter Lily doesn’t get along with Anna’s daughter Harper. Luckily, the Coleman family has a way to fix that: Swap bodies.
Much like the 2003 film, the way to solve your issues with another person is to quite literally walk in their shoes. And what really works about Freakier Friday is the marriage between the Millennial love for this movie and the Gen Z angle with the girls. It is why Freaky Friday worked for our generation and now the sequel is doing the same thing for the next one.
Anna still has her connection to music even if Pink Slip had a different career trajectory than we thought, Jake (Chad Michael Murray) is…well, pretty much the same, and the movie as a whole does a really great job of balancing what we think we want out of a movie like this and bringing us a different kind of connection to the sequel.
Yes, Anna is older but so is the original audience of that movie. I found myself emotional seeing people in universe love Anna and seeing the audience cheer for her like we were 12 again.
Lindsay Lohan is still our queen
One of my favorite parts about Freakier Friday was that it felt like a celebration of Lindsay Lohan movies I grew up on. There were little nods to her past films and it felt like a movie that was showing how amazing Lohan is. But that also felt like a celebration of us, the generation who grew up watching her in The Parent Trap or Mean Girls.
And as someone who watched people attack Lohan for years, it feels great to see her shine in something like Freakier Friday. She’s incredible in comedies like this and the new sequel proves that. Anna is part of Lohan in this movie, it is a character that she can clearly come back to easily and getting to see her work with Curtis again was everything to me. I was transported back to that theater as a young tween, crying over Pink Slip and understanding how to be understood.
A film for the next generation
As much as this movie is nostalgic, it is for Gen Z. I do feel bad that, while older Gen Z had these movies, for the most part there are a lot of the Gen Z generation that didn’t have movies like Lohan’s filmography growing up. We have, in a lot of ways, moved away from the tween/teen girl films and I do find that sad. Luckily, Freakier Friday gives that to the next generation with Harper and Lily.
Instead of Tess and Anna’s disconnect as mother and daughter, a lot of Freakier Friday is rooted in how complicated blending a family can be and while yes, there is still a disconnect between Tess and Anna and Harper doesn’t really have the best communication style with Anna, the body swapping aspect of this film is more about Lily and Harper. The two need to understand each other. And given the Coleman family history, this is the only way they can do that.
If you love Freaky Friday, this is the perfect sequel to our beloved 2003 teen classic. Freakier Friday hits theaters on August 8.
(featured image: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)
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