by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $15.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Jamie Lee Curtis, Lindsay Lohan, Julia Butters, Sophia Hammons, Mark Harmon, Chad Michael Murray, Manny Jacinto
Intro:
... an updated cover of an old favourite that actually gets the notes right.
In the era of Microwave Disney, the decision to reheat yet another of their fan favourites – 2003’s Freaky Friday – is far less surprising than it should be. And yet, between its stage musical adaptation (and later Disney Channel Original translation), its slasher parody in Christopher B. Landon’s Freaky, and whatever in the actual hell that Lil Dicky/Chris Brown novelty ringworm of a collab track was, a legacy sequel might be the most normal thing that has happened to this franchise in a while.
While sporting a slightly longer runtime, Freakier Friday is essentially a rehash of the 2003 film, with all kinds of body-swapping shenanigans and family drama and still-uncomfortable Chad Michael Murray love triangles on offer. The swapping pool may have doubled here with Anna’s daughter Harper (Julia Butters) and potential stepdaughter Lily (Sophia Hammons) now in the mix, but it’s still all about the wackiness of seeing Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis being entirely out of their age range on-screen. And dammit, it still works.
Curtis, whose aura of effortless cool has been on-lock for decades by this point, nails Lily, the suddenly-American senior citizen just as easily as she did with Anna the impudent therapist back in the day. But from Lohan, whose infamous life in the spotlight (and more recent attachment to the Netflix content mill) have overshadowed her professional work for quite some time, it’s remarkably refreshing. If anything, because she doesn’t have to play stuck-up and older-than-she-looks here, her and Curtis bring real ‘Eddy and Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous’ energy that, dare we say, might actually make this more fun than the original?
Admittedly, as is usually the case with body-swap stories, there’s still quite a bit of enfant terrible cringe to be had; being stuck in a body that isn’t yours is supposed to be uncomfortable, after all. But thankfully, director Nisha Ganatra and writer Jordan Weiss balance the awkwardness with heartstring-tuggers and quite a few genuine laughs, both between Curtis and Lohan and Butters and Hammons.
Ganatra’s experience with directing actors (getting career-highlight work out of Emma Thompson and John Lithgow in Late Night) and stories about the music industry (The High Note) serve her well here, allowing both the face-to-face confrontations and well-groomed nostalgia for 2000s-era angsty girl-driven pop rock to come through with equal clarity and verve. As this year’s Triple J Hottest 100 showed, with The Veronicas’ ‘Untouched’ landing at No. 3, this aesthetic that the 2003 film helped codify still has its audience and they are sure to be well-fed with this one.
Freakier Friday is an updated cover of an old favourite that actually gets the notes right. It has elements that date it about as severely as the 2003 original dated itself, but in terms of delivering that same flavour of restless slapstick and sentimental family values, it at the very least matches the efficacy of its predecessor. Lohan and Curtis’ chemistry is as wonderfully chaotic as ever, Butters (The Fabelmans, The Gray Man) adds another winner to her filmography while Hammons makes one hell of a feature debut impression, and the energy surrounding all four of them may be saturated in nostalgia, but it never comes from a cynical or (even worse) desperate place. At the film’s Aussie premiere, Lohan herself described the production as “a labour of love”, and from the efforts of all involved, that comes through as loud and beautifully as a perfectly-timed guitar solo. Get ready to have ‘Take Me Away’ stuck in your head all over again.
