Freakier Friday, the sequel to Disney’s 2003 teen classic Freaky Friday, seemed like a risky venture all round. Firstly, Disney has a very bad rep when it comes to sequels. Whenever the House of Mouse has a hit, its follow-up ends up getting script-by-committee’d to death. And then there’s star Lindsay Lohan, former teen queen of Hollywood turned troubled starlet with a rap sheet so long film studios once had to take out special insurance before they cast her.
Lohan, 39, has turned her life around and returned to acting, with leading roles in a trio of Netflix holiday romance slop movies. But it’s Freakier Friday that should herald her true return to her rightful throne of high voltage star power combined with comedy chops. And, amazingly, Disney hasn’t screwed up a sequel for the first time since Lion King 2.
The premise is simple: take Freaky Friday and double it. The body-swapping intergenerational curse that forces you to walk a mile in your annoying relative’s shoes and find empathy is back, and this time there’s four women getting the switcheroo treatment.
Anna (Lohan), now an adult and a single mother herself, is co-parenting teen daughter Harper (Julia Butters) with her own mother, Tess (Jamie Lee Curtis, also back for round two). Anna, now a music manager, still dreams of performing her own music with her former girl rock group Pink Slip. Harper wants to surf and hates her snooty British lab partner Lily (Sophia Hammons). When Anna falls for Lily’s also-single dad Eric (Manny Jacinto finally getting the romantic lead role he deserves), the enemies are set to become stepsisters, to their mutual horror.
Then a bargain basement palm reader at Anna’s bachelorette party accidentally puts a curse on them. Anna warps into Harpers body and vice-versa, while Tess swaps with Lily. Harper-as-Anna and Lily-as-Tess quickly realise this is their chance to break Anna and Eric up rather than work on being a blended family. Hijinks ensue, including a glorious return for Jake (Chad Michael Murray), Anna’s former flame who still has the horn for now-grandma Tess.
It’s also a victory lap for Oscar-winner Jamie Lee Curtis, who is at the top of her slapstick game. Having been shunned from Hollywood’s serious side for getting her start as a scream queen, she had her own renaissance with Everything Everywhere All At Once. Watching Curtis, 66, play a pouting teenager obsessed with getting her cleavage out won the biggest laughs from me. The scene where she does a supermarket sweep of the old people’s aisle in the pharmacy had me in stitches, even though home enema kits and adult nappies aren’t usually comedy fodder.
The horrors of aging being played for laughs, including by an actress who claims pickled beets have kept her looking surgically snatched, could have gone terribly wrong. But Freakier Friday sticks to the safer territories of creaky knees versus high metabolisms and such like. The Substance this is not.
Freakier Friday also tries to atone for the sins of its forebear. Freaky Friday may be infused with nostalgia for some viewers, but it was, uh, super racist in its use of Asian stereotypes. The curse was delivered via fortune cookie by the uncreatively named Chinese restaurant manager Pei-Pei. Orientalist music played each time an Asian character came on screen. It was a huge mess, and leaves a sour taste upon re-watching.
In the sequel, they let Jacinto rip as a snake-hipped chef who is a committed dad and partner, while daughter Hammon is given essentially two parts as both Lily and Tess-as-Lily. They’re both full characters with top billing, although if anything, the script is so terrified of going near their Asian identity it’s never really referenced or discussed. Tess experiences no racism in Lily’s body; Lily doesn’t flex any white privilege in Tess’s. At least the palm reader is a send-up of kooky white women into energy healing.
So, it’s not an entirely perfect movie. Harper and Lily could have done with having their characters fleshed out beyond ‘likes surfing’ and ‘likes fashion’. The attempt to plumb the psyches of the younger generation, with its gags about ‘being triggered’ left me cold. There was some honkingly obvious product placement, including some incredibly distracting cake pops in a Starbucks.
But I laughed, I cried (rare these days — thanks antidepressants), and I immediately planned to add it to a comfort movie rotation. I could watch another five sequels of Lohan and Curtis getting up to shenanigans. Congrats Disney, you’ve broken your own straight-to-DVD sequel curse. Or should that be streaming? Guess I’m old now, too.
In cinemas from August 8
