Starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Lindsay Lohan, Julia Butters, Sophia Hammons

Directed by Nisha Ganatra

Disney – in cinemas now

Twenty-two years after their first body swap, mother and daughter, Tess and Anna hit another family crisis, this time involving Tess’s granddaughter, Harper, and Harper’s prospective stepsister Lily.

Given that if you say Freaky Friday to me, my immediate response would be ‘oh yeah, that kids movie, with Jodie Foster’ – released in 1976 nearly half a century ago – it may be that I’m not exactly the target audience for this belated follow-up to the 2003 Lindsay Lohan/Jamie Lee Curtis iteration.

Or… perhaps I am. Perhaps that’s what is both right and wrong with Freakier Friday.

Full disclosure, I have a real soft spot for the Freaky Friday franchise (try saying that ten times very quickly). To be honest, I don’t really remember much about the Jodie Foster original, but I took my daughters to the 2003 remake and it was definitely a happy afternoon.

Familial body-swapping is a pretty failsafe source of physical and cultural age gags, and so it’s fun to come back to it with an added generation now that Lohan’s Anna has a daughter of her own, Harper (Julia Butters). But kudos to screenwriter Jordan Weiss for adding not just a third swappee, but a fourth with the addition of stepdaughter-to-be, Lily (Sophia Hammons).

With the youngest generation at odds with both each other and their shortly to be married parents it’s an impressive piece of narrative plate spinning to create something coherent from this new four-way swap. The dynamics are solid. Anna has forsaken dreams of rock stardom to bring up Harper as a lone parent, but now she’s about to marry an English guy, Eric (Manny Jacinto), and his daughter Lily is hellbent on scuppering the event. Meanwhile Grandma Tess (Jamie Lee Curtis) is secretly terrified that Anna will emigrate to London. Everyone is seemingly at odds with everyone, when they chance upon a dubious new age psychic, Madame Jen (Vanessa Bayer) who turns out to be more effective than even she imagines. As with the original, they have to walk in each other’s shoes until they reach an honest emotional reconciliation.

Is it predictable? Yes. Funny? I thought so. Deep? Definitely not. Sentimental? Absolutely. Perhaps Freakier Friday would buckle under its own cheesiness if it weren’t for Jamie Lee Curtis goofing around as a Gen Z in a sexagenarian’s body without a scintilla of self-consciousness. As if anyone of my generation (she’s just a year old than me) could love her more.

But is that the problem with the movie? Who is this sequel for? There weren’t any teens at all in the screening I attended, so I had no idea whether it would have landed with them, or just felt like old people making jokes about themselves. By adding the third generation it inevitably skews the humour older. I enjoy it because I identify with Tess, fighting off the dying of the light by playing body-host to a kid who still believes herself to be immortal. I’m not sure how well that POV plays for the younger demographic.

Verdict: Freakier Friday is hard to truly dislike, but it’s a movie that sits a bit uncomfortably between markets. If you’re not bothered about such industry particulars then it makes for a perfectly enjoyable couple of hours of generational movie bubble gum. 6/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com