‘Freakier Friday’ review: feel-good noughties nostalgia from unlikely sequel

Three years ago, a sequel to 2003’s wild, wacky and wonderful Freaky Friday was nothing more than millennial wishful thinking. Recently though, the stars have aligned. Jamie Lee Curtis has parlayed her post-Oscar win cachet into a producer’s role while co-star Lindsay Lohan has restored her lustre with a string of corny yet feel-good Netflix rom-coms including last year’s Irish Wish.

Arriving a full 22 years after their first team-up, Freakier Friday (itself a remake of a 1976 Jodie Foster vehicle) is even getting a theatrical release instead of being sequestered straight to Disney+ like Hocus Pocus 2.  It all feels wonderfully nostalgic – right down to S Club star Rachel Stevens DJing at last week’s UK premiere.

Thankfully the film itself doesn’t botch the opportunity to deliver more body-swap fun and frolics. Directed by Nisha Ganatra, whose previous credits include the pithy Mindy Kaling-Emma Thompson comedy Late Night, it recovers from a sluggish start to become a warm and watchable romp.

The 2003 movie followed an accidental body-swap between teen guitar-shredder Anna Coleman (Lohan) and her overprotective mother Tess (Curtis). This time around, we get a double swap. Anna, who has shelved her own musical ambitions to manage Gen Z pop star Ella (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), switches places with her own teenage daughter Harper (Julia Butters).

Meanwhile, Tess trades bodies with Lily (Sophia Hammons), the teenage daughter of Anna’s chef fiancé Eric (Manny Jacinto). Over-complicated? A little bit. The screenplay by Dollface creator Jordan Weiss takes a little too long to introduce the new characters as well. It also labours the strained relationship between Harper and Lily: weirdly, the latter’s slightly stiff Britishness is a major bone of contention.

Fortunately, the script gets sharper as the film progresses – at one point, the teenage characters describe Facebook as being “like a database of old people” which is painfully accurate. And this time around, the body-swap occurs following a visit to Madame Jen (SNL alum Vanessa Bayer), a ridiculous grifter who tells fortunes in between Starbucks shifts and teaching Reiki.

This is a marked improvement on the 2003 movie’s problematic pivotal scene involving fortune cookies being exchanged in an exoticised Chinese restaurant. Director Ganatra has said she brought up Freaky Friday‘s “hurtful” Asian stereotypes in her first meetings with this film’s producers.

There’s also a sweetly anachronistic feel to proceedings, which is presumably intentional. How else to explain this 2020s sequel to a 2000s movie featuring riffs on Chumbawamba‘s 1990s hit ‘Tubthumping’ (yes, really) and classic 1980s rom-com Dirty Dancing? A clichéd food fight scene could have appeared in any high school movie made in the last 50 years.

It’s heaps of fun watching Curtis chuck herself around the set in the name of slapstick as Lohan delivers the sort of poised performance she built her career on 20 years ago. Freakier Friday isn’t a flawless sequel but it does supply a satisfying nostalgia rush – hopefully, solid box office isn’t just millennial wishful thinking.