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Freakier Friday Review: Curtis and Lohan Return, But The Magic Doesn't

Freakier Friday is yet another legacy sequel that feels like it was made to print money instead of the desire to tell a new story.

Freakier Friday fundamentally doesn't work because the film desperately tries to convince the audience that Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsey Lohan are aging badly, and the only jokes they come up with are cheap shots at aging.

Director: Nisha Ganatra
Summary: 22 years after Tess and Anna endured an identity crisis, Anna now has a daughter and a soon-to-be stepdaughter. As they navigate the challenges that come when two families merge, Tess and Anna discover that lightning might strike twice.

How Freakier Friday Reinforces The Idea That Aging Is Bad

When it comes to aging, there is absolutely no way for people to win. While the fight against the very concept of aging is one that spans all genders, the pressure that specifically falls on female-presenting people is on another level. If you wear makeup, you're fake, but if you don't wear any, someone will say you look tired or dead. You have to lose weight, but not too much, and you'd better lose it the "right" way because someone is going to say one way is a cop-out or wrong. You need to age gracefully, but you can't actually show any signs of that aging because 30 is the new 80, and people have no concept of what normal people look like anymore. So you need to combat this, and you go to get some plastic surgery, and suddenly you're not even human anymore, but the beauty ideals are literally impossible to achieve without surgery or filters.

Things in Hollywood are just as bad, and while Freakier Friday and the previous film are trying to have a little fun, the reality is this is one hour and fifty-one minutes of the script taking cheap shots at Curtis and Lohan's looks. Both Curtis and Lohan spent their formative years under the judgmental eyes of Hollywood. Curtis began acting when she was 19, and Lohan was even younger; she was only 10. The avenue that led Curtis to her battle with addiction was because she had a cosmetic procedure. And millennials watched Lohan spiral for most of her teens and twenties, so seeing her on screen here again is worth the price of admission alone.

And while many will likely say that I'm reading too much into a Disney sequel that feels right at home with other direct-to-streaming entries, aka the modern version of the direct-to-DVD films. However, no movie is made in a vacuum, and while the physical aspects of aging are a massive part of it, the writers of Freakier Friday kept going for that low-hanging fruit. What is so funny about wrinkles? Someone needs to explain it to me, because I can't figure out what the punchline of "Tess has wrinkles" is. Lohan and Curtis, as Julia and Lily, make one bad, superficial joke about aging and how teenagers would, like, hate that so much because they aren't pretty anymore.

Maybe that's why the parts of the film where we are following Tess and Anna are in the bodies of the teenagers. They do a few more things here that are a little interesting. Instead of commenting about the physical aspects of how much younger these bodies are, they instead reference the insane metabolism that teenagers have. And the only real comment on the teenagers' younger bodies is how durable they are. The visual gags with Anna and Tess are much better, like in the image above, where we see them slathered in sunscreen and sunhats because they know how important it is to wear sunscreen; there was a whole song about it, but the other students don't.

Writing Believable Teenagers Remains A Difficult Task

Unfortunately, the source of the conflict, the two people who need to learn a lesson, and the two actresses with top billing are the focal point. Freakier Friday stumbles as a boomer and a millennial say the words in a script also written by a millennial who thinks this is how Gen Z talks and this is what they care about. It's hard to write believable teenagers, it always has been, but the dissonance here is even worse. This is such a bad portrayal of Gen Z; vapid, selfish, and only seem to care when the consequences hit them personally.

All of this makes Freakier Friday sound like an awful film, and while the very concept is flawed, the film itself isn't bad enough to be enraging. It's a streaming film with all the good and bad that comes from something like that. For a movie fans have been begging for for years, this script reads like it was banged out in a weekend. There is a fanbase here, and there was no reason for this movie to feel as rushed and half assed as it does.

However, for some, the concept itself works for them, and they are going to like those jokes. As we said with The Naked Gun review last week, whether or not you find something funny is subject much in the same way different aspects of horror hit differently for different people. And much like The Naked Gun, while the script has some weak writing, the delivery from the actors is still great. Curtis is such an underrated comedic actress, and Lindsey Lohan deserves everything good in the world (don't @ me). Our two younger ladies, playing Julia and Lily, Julia Butters and Sophia Hammons, are a lot of fun to watch and remain the best parts of the film.

Freakier Friday is yet another legacy sequel that feels like it was made for the sole purpose of printing money instead of the desire to tell a new story. And while we all exist in a capitalistic hellscape, plenty of legacy sequels have turned out some genuinely great films over the last couple of years. Fans have been begging for this one for a long time, and it's genuinely so good to see Lohan on the big screen. It seems like the bond she has with Curtis is very genuine, and to see her glowing on red carpets in outfits that reference her previous films, Barbie style (same stylist), is just fantastic. No film is created in a vacuum, no matter how inconsequential you might think it is. Impossible beauty standards on female-presenting people and how some seem terrified by the very concept of getting old are very real issues people of every age face, so why are we laughing at the concept of wrinkles? Someone still needs to explain to me what the punchline to "woman in her 60s has wrinkles" is; I'll wait.

Freakier Friday

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Review by Kaitlyn Booth

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5/10

Freakier Friday fundamentally doesn't work because the film desperately tries to convince the audience that Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsey Lohan are aging badly, and the only jokes they come up with are cheap shots at aging.

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