Jamie Lee Curtis has hit back at a review of her new film Freakier Friday, claiming she found the withering feedback “a tad harsh.”
Curtis, 66, stars alongside Lindsay Lohan, 39, in the sequel to their 2003 body-swap family comedy Freaky Friday.
The film has generally been a hit with critics and audiences. It currently has a score of 73% on reviews aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, and an even more impressive 94% score from the general public.
However, some reviews have not been so kind. On Instagram, a post from Time magazine claimed the film offers “ugly costumes, humiliating scenarios, and zero added value” and damned it as “a sequel with the sole purpose of cashing in on the fondness people have for the original movie and nothing more.”
Curtis personally defended the film in the comments section of the post, writing: “SEEMS a TAD HARSH.”
The Oscar-winning actor added: “SOME people LOVE it. Me being one.”
The Independent’s film critic Clarisse Loughrey sided with Time, arguing in her two-star review that “Lohan deserves better than the unfunny nostalgia of this belated sequel.”
“A lot has been made about the apparent preciousness of this 22-years-later return to a millennial favourite,” writes Loughrey. “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).”
She continues: “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’.”
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During the production of the film, Curtis used her Instagram to call out paparazzi intrusion on the set.
“We have tried to so hard to keep our story a secret and private until it’s time for release but once in a while an image comes out,” she wrote last August. “And it doesn’t tell you anything about the story or about what’s going on with the characters but it does show the joy and fun that we had making #FREAKIERFRIDAY and we know it will be the experience that you will have in the theaters next year.”
