As movies have taught us again and again, Fridays are freaky as hell. If it’s Friday in a movie that means you’re either about to swap bodies with your mom or daughter, or you’re about to get murdered by an Oedipal zombie in a hockey mask. Either way there will be issues to work out. We don’t say “Thank God It’s Friday.” We say “Thank God! It’s Friday!” because if we piss off whoever is in charge of the universe we’re going to get in a lot of magical trouble. On Fridays.
One of the freakiest Fridays took place in 2003, when rock ’n’ roll teenager Anna Coleman (Lindsay Lohan) swapped bodies with her psychologist mother Tess (Jamie Lee Curtis). They had a valuable lesson to learn about how being an adult is tougher than kids realize and being a teenager is tougher than adults remember, so we should all be more considerate of everyone else’s feelings. Aw. That “Freaky Friday” turned out kinda nice.
Now the year is 2025 and Anna has a teenage daughter of her own (don’t ask with whom, the movie doesn’t either). Harper Coleman, played by Julia Butters, is a surfer kid who surfs. She also hates high school and feels smothered by her mother. Ordinarily this wouldn’t be a lot of character traits for an actor to work with but Lindsay Lohan spun gold out of similar straw 22 years ago, and Julia Butters is fully capable of doing it today.
Harper has a stuck-up fashionista arch-enemy named Lily (Sophia Hammons). When they fight so hard it blows up a school science lab, Anna meets Lily’s single father, Eric (Manny Jacinto), they fall madly in love and soon decide to get married. But their daughters still hate each other, and they all fight over whether to live in Los Angeles or England, where Eric and Lily are from. Tess is still there too. When Tess bickers with Anna about the best way to raise Harper and Lily, an extremely random psychic performs a magic spell that makes all four of them switch bodies.
And thus, an even “Freakier Friday” begins.
Also a more complicated Friday. The original “Freaky Friday” was a simple two-hander where Lindsay Lohan got to play Jamie Lee Curtis and vice-versa. Lindsay Lohan acted like a stick-in-the-mud adult, Jamie Lee Curtis acted like a brazen child, and both actors proved they were at the top of their game.
In “Freakier Friday,” Lohan and Curtis wind up in Julia Butters’ and Sophia Hammons’ teenaged bodies. Meanwhile, Butters and Hammons wind up in the bodies of adults. It’s a more complicated situation and as such, it sometimes strains the narrative confines of the body-swapping premise. We spend a lot less time with each character before they switch, so when they do, it’s harder to tell how effectively these performers can mimic each other. (It doesn’t help that the makers of “Freakier Friday” apparently think British accents are genetic, since Curtis and Hammons don’t talk differently at all.)
Even though the premise of “Freakier Friday” is cluttered, the movie is a satisfying and emotional treat. There’s a fundamental kindness to the “Freaky Friday” films, a reassuring belief in the importance of empathy and communication. Marrying that sentiment to a whimsical wish fulfillment fantasy about being a kid again or, conversely, having all the power of a full-grown adult, is extremely appealing. It’s cute to see Julia Butters and Sophia Hammons fall off their scooters, realize their young bodies aren’t seriously injured, and scream that they’re invincible before horking down a mountain of junk food. What a dream.
And although the focus is on the women of the story, these “Freaky/Freakier Friday” movies have wonderfully gentle ideas about masculinity. The men in Tess and Anna’s lives are supportive and thoughtful, but often befuddled partners who kinda get put through the ringer yet always prove their mettle in the end. Even poor Jake (Chad Michael Murray), the love interest from the original movie, turned out okay, although the sexual confusion he experienced after falling in love with a girl and her mother — or so he thought — appears to have left him in need of a little therapy.
“Freakier Friday” is the best kind of legacy sequel. It harkens back to what made the original work without literally doing the same thing all over again. It reunites a great cast and gives the new stars just as much time to shine. It’s full of easter eggs from the original but isn’t beholden to lazy nostalgia, and mostly works on its own, whether you’ve seen the 2003 version of “Freaky Friday” or not. It’s still sweet, it’s still funny, it’s still freaky, and it’s still Friday. Thank God.
“Freakier Friday” opens in theaters on Friday, Aug.8