Freakier Friday: Maybe It Was Freaky Enough the First Time?

If a movie about a strange and crazy day is commercially successful, why not recycle it and double the kookiness quotient? That seems to be the logic behind this followup to Freaky Friday. Freakier Friday also brings back the likable stars of the earlier film, Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis. What could go wrong?

Unfortunately, a lot. When a mother and daughter switch bodies in the first Freaky Friday movie, we get it. But increasing the amount of characters who trade places in Freakier Friday (two soon-to-be-stepsisters, a mom and grandma) makes it hard to keep track of who’s who.

The movie starts out straightforwardly enough. Anna Coleman (Lindsay Lohan), the teenager in the earlier film, is a music producer who now has her own teenage daughter, Harper (Julia Butters). Anna’s mother Tess (Jamie Lee Curtis) is a fun grandmother who likes pickleball and board games. Problems arise when single mom Anna falls in love with single dad Eric Reyes (Manny Jacinto), whose daughter Lily (Sophia Hammons) is Harper’s school nemesis. Harper and Lily are being brats about the impending marriage of their parents, and to teach them a lesson, the universe orchestrates another body-switching Friday. This leads Harper to become her mom while Lily and Tess trade places.

It was a fun idea, but feels clunky in practice. Harper is not as out of place in Anna’s world as the mother and daughter were in the earlier movie. And why is Lily in the body of Tess, who is peripheral to the movie’s central drama; the marriage of the girls’ two parents? It’s lucky that Curtis is in the movie as Tess, however, as she adds much needed personality to a project that not only recycles an earlier movie, but uses tired scenes such as cars driving recklessly, scooters crashing into a vendor and making food fly everywhere, and a high school food fight.

The movie incorporates a blend of racial identities (Eric and Lily are Asian, the singer Anna manages is Tamil Canadian) in a natural way. But the frequent jokes made about Tess’ age (thin lips, wrinkles, brittle bones) go on too long. Some lessons about empathy are learned, but Freakier Friday mostly seems content to lean on threadbare formulas of the past rather than try anything new.