‘Freakier Friday’ review: Lohan, Curtis realign for a four-way swap

“Freakier Friday” proves that time is its own magical device. Generations of fans of the body-swap series — from the original 1972 novel by Mary Rodgers and Jodie Foster‘s 1976 Disney adaptation to this 21st century update — have had decades to learn firsthand that everyone becomes their parents, no cursed fortune cookie required.

In the justly beloved 2003 remake, emo teenager Anna (Lindsay Lohan) was horrified to wake up as her uptight mother Tess (Jamie Lee Curtis) — and vice versa — on the eve of Tess’ wedding. Now, Anna is the strict single mother who can’t get her grouchy high schooler, Harper (Julia Butters), to approve of her own fiancé, Eric (Manny Jacinto), a doting British widower who comes with his bratty girl, Lily (Sophia Hammons). Meanwhile, Tess beams with satisfaction that age alone has made Anna a dork and her the cool grandma. “You’re so lame,” she teases her daughter.

Before you can say “Beware that psychic” (played by a hilarious Vanessa Bayer), all four females switch physiques: Harper with Anna and Lily with Tess. You know that Mark Twain quote, “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes”? Here, it’s an echoey reverb with all the panicked gals shouting at once.

The goal of the first Lohan and Curtis movie was to get the relatable pair to experience life in each other’s sneakers and heels. Both ultimately understood that the other’s priorities deserved respect, be it Anna’s rock band practice or Tess’ root canal. The goal of Nisha Ganatra’s serviceable sequel is to get audiences who love those characters to buy a ticket and hang out with them again. (Everyone — yes, everyone — is back.) There’s not that much emotional insight to glean from forcing Lily to become her potential step-grandmother, a stranger she barely knows. There’s simply hijinks.

The kids, who hate each other, use their adult-shaped opportunity to try to split up their mom and dad so they don’t have to be siblings, like the screenplay itself is its own swapped inversion of Lohan’s other childhood remake, “The Parent Trap.” They also land good zingers about what Gen Z considers passé. Lily sneers that Facebook is “a database of old people.” Meanwhile Anna and Tess, who’ve been through this before, don’t have much motivation beyond using their lithe young bodies to ride scooters and scarf cheeseburgers. Editor Eleanor Infante entrusts the movie’s energy to montages: fashion shoots, photo booths, feeding frenzies. The storyboards could have been a cheery Instagram slideshow.

Anna and Harper’s central mother-daughter plot line is so hastily sketched that it barely registers. “Freakier Friday” is in such a rush to get on with things that we don’t get much of a sense of either of their personalities. Anna, who’s grown up to manage a needy pop singer named Ella (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), is your standard earnest mother. Harper, uh, likes to surf. It’s no fault of the actors that you have to squint very, very hard to see the girl inside the woman and the woman inside the girl — Lohan is grounded and likable in her big comeback, holding the screen with assurance. But it is a shame that the promising Butters doesn’t get the same showcase of her own preternaturally mature talent, other than one scene where she yells and another one where she cries.

Tess and Lily are easier to parse. Tess, a therapist, is so certain her opinions are important that she steps on everyone’s sentences. Lily is vain and snippy and about as convincingly English as if the only research into her character was a season of “The Great British Bake Off.” As evidence, there’s a bake sale where her treat is accused of having the dreaded “soggy bottom,” triggering an epically well-staged food fight.

Jordan Weiss’ script is so tangential to the movie’s charms that things would feel pretty much the same if Harper and Lily had traded places, or honestly, if no one swapped at all. People just want to see Curtis and Lohan palling around in a comedy that frames their reunion like it’s the Hope Diamond. With both actors confidently cutting loose, their chemistry pulls so much focus that it’s a continual struggle to remember the basic conceit. My brain refused to absorb that it was watching Harper as Anna played by Lohan. It just lit up at how nice it was to see Lohan strap on a guitar and sing a couple of songs. Adorably, the numbers Anna wrote in high school for her all-girl band, Pink Slip, went on to become minor hits — when Pink Slip reunites onstage at the Wiltern Theater, the crowd knows their lyrics.

Half of Tess’ lines are just variations on vain Lily’s fear of wrinkles, dentures and suit jackets stuffed with used tissues. “I’m bloody decomposing!” she wails. The gags are more cruel than clever. But Curtis hurls herself into this schtick with gusto — say, demanding a ring light and lip plumper for her passport photo — and gets you laughing anyway. (As a reward, the costumer Natalie O’Brien highlights Curtis’ eternally spectacular curves.) Curtis is having such a blast channeling her inner fashionista that I’d have been content with just a Tess and Lily swap with an ordinary Anna and Harper covering for their chaos before any of the exceedingly patient men in their lives find out.

There’s so much, and yet so little, happening that the key image of the movie turns out to be an early throwaway joke: Tess driving her granddaughter to school and getting flummoxed by the logjam at a four-way stop. None of these characters has the narrative right of way. When the four women reconvene at a wedding rehearsal dinner, the staging of the restaurant scene is just as frustrating, with the audience staring at everyone’s faces, wondering who, if anyone, will take charge.

Ganatra is mildly interested in cramming bodies inside another and majorly invested in squeezing as many funny female comics as possible into the running time, with fantastic cameos for Chloe Fineman as a dance instructor, X Mayo as a school principal, June Diane Raphael as a ferocious pickleball competitor and Santina Muha as a lovelorn immigration agent. Bayer is terrific as Madame Jen, the cause of this film’s corporal confusion, a flam-flam artist who side-hustles as a barista.

The film is safely, studiously PG. When the underage child-women chug glasses of wine, a cutaway assures us its merely grape juice. Anna’s former high school boyfriend Jake (Chad Michael Murray) gets roped into the action and I’d bet my own soul that there was once a version where he was Harper’s conspicuously unnamed dad. Someone decided it would be too weird that the girl uses her mom’s skin suit to flirt with him in the hope he’ll disrupt the wedding.

The old crank in me wished that I laughed harder than I did. “Freakier Friday” won’t trade places with the original in audience’s hearts. But this disposable delight will at least allow fans who’ve grown up alongside Lohan to take their own offspring to the theater and bond about what the series means to them — to let their children picture them young — and then pinkie-swear, “Let’s never let that happen to us.”