Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
When ideas run thin, revisit an old favourite and give it a fresh spin. And thus we get ‘Freakier Friday’, sequel to the 2003 comedy ‘Freaky Friday’, with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan stepping back into their old roles more than two decades later.
Directed by Nisha Ganatra, the body-swap comedy doubles the chaos by having four characters across three generations wake up screaming in different bodies after a chaotic night where nobody is particularly nice to each other. Freakier Friday indeed!
Celebrity manager Anna Coleman (Lindsay Lohan) is ready to marry new British boyfriend Eric Reyes (Manny Jacinto), but it means moving to the UK, a move neither her mother Tess (Jamie Lee Curtis), nor her teen daughter Harper (Julia Butters) are happy about. To add to the family drama, Eric’s teen daughter Lily (Sophia Hammons) is in the same class as Harper, and the girls hate each other. In-fact, that’s how their parents meet: when called to the principal’s office after their daughters get in trouble at school.
Anna finds herself in the body of her surfer daughter Harper, while Tess wakes up as her future step-granddaughter Lily, to Lily’s utter horror. Jamie Lee Curtis is an absolute riot as a teenager trapped in a grandmother’s body, delivering some of the film’s biggest laughs.
“My face looks like a Birkin bag that’s been left out in the sun to rot!” she howls, in a moment so hilarious it almost seems like Lindsay Lohan breaks character trying not to laugh. At times, the cast doesn’t take things too seriously, giving ‘Freakier Friday’ the feel of an extended SNL-style parody.
While the older women in the teen bodies try to ensure the younger girls function like believable adults as them, the teens decide they should do everything to break up their parents. Harper and Lily start off by cancelling a lot of appointments for the upcoming wedding, and contacting Anna’s ex-boyfriend Jake (Chad Michael Murray).
Meanwhile the older women struggle at pretending to be Gen-Z kids, and start their body swap journey by eating lots of carbs, fries, and milkshakes. Some of the most enjoyable moments of ‘Freakier Friday’ are the ones where the girls and the women are simply having fun.
This exchange between Lily as Tess’ (Jamie) with Jake is probably one of the funniest scenes in the film –
Jake: How old is he? (your husband)
Lily as Tess: I don’t know. We never talk about it. Somewhere between 50 and 100.
Quite frankly, I wasn’t expecting a lot from this comedy, but it turned out to be low-stakes, cutesy film, with just enough laughs and silly shenanigans to keep you entertained until the end. The moral of course remains the same: you don’t really understand what the other person is going through unless you literally step into their shoes.
Watch ‘Freakier Friday’ on Disney/HotStar.
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