‘Freakier Friday’ assessment: feel-good noughties nostalgia

Three years in the past, a sequel to 2003’s wild, wacky and fantastic Freaky Friday was nothing greater than millennial wishful pondering. Lately although, the celebs have aligned. Jamie Lee Curtis has parlayed her post-Oscar win cachet right into a producer’s function whereas co-star Lindsay Lohan has restored her lustre with a string of corny but feel-good Netflix rom-coms together with final 12 months’s Irish Want.

Arriving a full 22 years after their first team-up, Freakier Friday (itself a remake of a 1976 Jodie Foster car) is even getting a theatrical launch as a substitute of being sequestered straight to Disney+ like Hocus Pocus 2.  All of it feels splendidly nostalgic – proper right down to S Membership star Rachel Stevens DJing finally week’s UK premiere.

Fortunately the movie itself doesn’t botch the chance to ship extra body-swap enjoyable and frolics. Directed by Nisha Ganatra, whose earlier credit embody the pithy Mindy Kaling-Emma Thompson comedy Late Evening, it recovers from a sluggish begin to turn into a heat and watchable romp.

The 2003 film adopted an unintentional body-swap between teen guitar-shredder Anna Coleman (Lohan) and her overprotective mom Tess (Curtis). This time round, we get a double swap. Anna, who has shelved her personal musical ambitions to handle Gen Z pop star Ella (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), switches locations together with her personal teenage daughter Harper (Julia Butters).

In the meantime, Tess trades our bodies with Lily (Sophia Hammons), the teenage daughter of Anna’s chef fiancé Eric (Manny Jacinto). Over-complicated? Somewhat bit. The screenplay by Dollface creator Jordan Weiss takes a little bit too lengthy to introduce the brand new characters as effectively. It additionally labours the strained relationship between Harper and Lily: weirdly, the latter’s barely stiff Britishness is a serious bone of competition.

Thankfully, the script will get sharper because the movie progresses – at one level, the teenage characters describe Fb as being “like a database of outdated individuals” which is painfully correct. And this time round, the body-swap happens following a go to to Madame Jen (SNL alum Vanessa Bayer), a ridiculous grifter who tells fortunes in between Starbucks shifts and educating Reiki.

It is a marked enchancment on the 2003 film’s problematic pivotal scene involving fortune cookies being exchanged in an exoticised Chinese language restaurant. Director Ganatra has mentioned she introduced up Freaky Friday‘s “hurtful” Asian stereotypes in her first conferences with this movie’s producers.

There’s additionally a sweetly anachronistic really feel to proceedings, which is presumably intentional. How else to clarify this 2020s sequel to a 2000s film that includes riffs on Chumbawamba‘s Nineties hit ‘Tubthumping’ (sure, actually) and basic Nineteen Eighties rom-com Soiled Dancing? A clichéd meals struggle scene might have appeared in any highschool film made within the final 50 years.

It’s heaps of enjoyable watching Curtis chuck herself across the set within the title of slapstick as Lohan delivers the form of poised efficiency she constructed her profession on 20 years in the past. Freakier Friday isn’t a flawless sequel nevertheless it does provide a satisfying nostalgia rush – hopefully, strong field workplace isn’t simply millennial wishful pondering.