I’m entirely aware that looking for logic in a sequel to Freaky Friday is, to quote one Cher Horowitz, “as useless as searching for meaning in a Pauly Shore movie”. The 2003 adaptation of Mary Rodgers’s 1972 novel saw Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis swap bodies via some cultural stereotyping in a Chinese restaurant, so that mother and daughter could literally walk in each other’s shoes. No one really questioned how this happened, and what it might suggest about the existence of magical or higher powers. And this time around, when they swap bodies again, no one contacts an exorcist despite it being done via a fortune teller (Vanessa Bayer) who speaks in demonic tongues.
And that’s fine. As an audience, we accept the magical realist conceit, and in return we receive jokes about adults dressing like teenagers and teenagers horrified by butts that sag and knees that crack. And yet, I still have a bone to pick with the Freaky Friday universe. Here, Lohan’s Anna, who is set to marry British chef Eric (Manny Jacinto), swaps bodies with her daughter Harper (Julia Butters). Meanwhile, Eric’s also-British daughter Lily (Sophia Hammons) swaps with Anna’s mother, Tess (Jamie Lee Curtis). Somehow, though, their accents stay the same – it’s as if the film is proposing that Britishness lives in the larynx and not in the brain. At least it might have been funny to see Curtis attempt a silly little accent – and Freakier Friday is sadly in desperate need of more funny.
A lot has been made about the apparent preciousness of this 22-years-later return to a millennial favourite: Curtis and Lohan have, so they say, remained friends, and their big screen reunion also happens to mark Lohan’s return to cinemas after a long absence and a triple-bill of deliriously silly Netflix romcoms (nothing in this film is funnier than whatever was going on in Irish Wish).
Lohan is currently undergoing a re-examination of her cruel and invasive treatment by the press and public – much like the conversation surrounding Pamela Anderson at the moment. And I’d love for Freakier Friday to be her Naked Gun. But none of that reinvention or reclamation is actually up on the screen. Instead, she and Curtis are left to merely milk nostalgia out of the film’s original fanbase, while anyone who’s 18 and below gets two Chappell Roan songs and some references to “safe spaces” and “gluten-free options”.
Harper and Lily object both to the prospect of being stepsisters and to any talk of relocating to London, so they spend their body swap time trying to split their parents up, with the help of Anna’s old high school boyfriend, Jake (Chad Michael Murray, essentially in a cameo role). But their antics are limited by the fact that none of the quartet, save one, is actually imitating the person they’ve swapped with. Lohan and Curtis go for generic immaturity, while Hammons plays it uptight. Kudos, then, to Butters, for doing a commendable job of capturing Lohan’s tone and mannerisms.
The actor’s been consistently great since she upstaged Leonardo DiCaprio in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood at the minuscule age of 10. So it only makes it sadder that someone so charming and funny isn’t being given the kind of original, imaginative material Lohan once thrived upon. Instead, the talent of tomorrow has to play second fiddle to a generation’s inability to let go of the past. And that’s something a quick body swap can’t solve.
Dir: Nisha Ganatra. Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, Lindsay Lohan, Julia Butters, Sophia Hammons, Manny Jacinto, Mark Harmon. Cert PG, 111 minutes.
‘Freakier Friday’ is in cinemas from 8 August
