Freakier Friday - Doubling the Swaps for a Sloppier Plot

Lindsay Lohan's Anna and Jamie Lee Curtis' Tess (right center/left center, respectively) are joined by newcomers Julia Butters and Sophia Hammons' Harper and Lily (far right and far left, respectively). Yes, it's a four-way switcheroo between the squealing stars...but their swaps are less orthodox this time, happening with the less expected option.

Freaky Friday is the epitome of an unlikely franchise, a series of films based on a kitschy premise that never quite seems to die. What began as the ick-fulfillment tale of a homely daughter swapping bods with her comparatively comely mom soon boomed into an all-out genre; the so-called “switcheroo,” for whatever reason, became a recurring phenomenon every decade or two. Indeed, Disney releases a new Freaky flick whenever the public seems ripe for another errant trip in the opposite’s shoes; though the details change, Freaky’s basics are always the same. Mother and daughter, after being at odds with each other, get to experience life from the opposite side, through the other’s eyes. It’s childhood innocence mixed with a pinch of grown-up subversion. It’s a franchise of wonky tales teetering warily on the edge of shlock…but always saved thanks to the graces of its PG-friendly frame.

And rescued, really, by Disney. Freaky Friday, in all its bodily dysmorphia and consensual ambiguities, coulda/shoulda have remained trapped in the 1972 paperback written by Mary Rodgers. But Disney saw an opportunity, adapting the story at least four different times: The 1976 film which started the trend, depicting daughter Annabelle actually pleased to find herself conforming to Mommy’s grown-up form; the 1995 remake that repeated the idea but presented a daughter far more stressed about donning Mom’s body; the 2003 iteration which modernized the formula, turning Annabelle into “Anna,” a hard-rockin' girl who soon finds herself trapped in the flesh of Tess, her prim-and-proper mother. And lastly, there’s the 2018 musical that’s easily the strangest of them all, switching mom and progeny to the beat of some catchy tunes and flamboyant moves.

Though fans debate which of the four films is the superior telling, Disney has picked its own winner with 2025’s Freakier Friday; more than remix the same old tropes for another go, Disney has given the 2003 version an unexpected sequel. And why not? In a time where nostalgia has become a profitable commodity, bringing back former teen idol Lindsay Lohan (Anna) and the ever-perennial Jamie Lee Curtis (Tess) makes a sort of twisted sense. Yes, the mother/daughter duo will undergo another body swap catastrophe, but this time they aren’t alone. Because this time, their predicament has become an unfortunate foursome.

Freaky Friday--The Unlikely, Undying Franchise

Freaky Friday has endured over four decades across four versions. Freakier Friday is the first sequel, extending the 2003 iteration's storyline (upper righthand corner).

A fortune teller, not a fortune cookie, gets the girls switched this time. But despite the provided pairings as foreshadowed above, the script has other ideas as to who swaps with whom.

Freakier Friday, indeed, multiplies the formula…and not necessarily for the best, relying on genre tropes and fan-servicey callbacks to the 2003 film while also searching for its own identity. The result isn’t necessarily a freakier film—just a weirder one.

The movie begins predictably enough: Anna, that music-lovin' teen, is now a single mother herself. But unlike the original film which has her quietly grieving her late father, here she’s a single mom “by choice.” This revelation comes early and quick without much explanation, but apparently, Anna decided to have a child through science, resulting in a spunky surfer daughter named Harper. Whether a statement on female empowerment or just a way to simplify a soon-ballooning script, it’s a premise contradictory to one of the film’s upcoming and central themes. Anna, ostensibly, has set aside her would-be stardom for the sake of raising Harper, a sacrifice the oblivious/ungrateful Harper will appreciate later. But here’s the problem: if Harper was conceived, not by husband or happenstance, but very deliberately through a lab…Anna has already made her liberated, unhindered decision. She chose having a child—to be a single mother—over a glorious musical career. In short, she isn’t some hapless, downtrodden mother suddenly struggling to raise a daughter by herself. Harper isn’t the deterrent to Mom’s musical ambitions; Mom herself is.

But never mind.

The real plot doesn’t materialize until Harper trudges off to school. Here, we meet her rival: Lily Reyes, a British immigrant who’s the hoity-toity, fashionista counterpart to Harper’s more carefree, grungy existence. On the surface, their tenuous relationship mirrors Anna’s own troubles with Stacey Hinkhouse, her nemesis from the first film. Savvy viewers might even suspect that it’s Lily and Harper who might be in for a certain switcheroo adieu. But they’d be wrong.

At a teacher-parent conference, Anna meets Eric, Lily’s recently widowed father. Naturally, the two single parents fall in love and, six months later, a wedding is planned. The two soon-to-be stepsisters are, of course, mortified by the sudden development. Could things get any worse? More unlikely? More inexplicable?

Well, enter Anna’s mother, Tess, who up to this point hasn’t had much to do. Enter a weird fortune teller who's more clueless than skilled. And soon, enter a four-way swapping of body and spirit that completely subverts all expectation and narrative sense.

Freakier Friday - Stays Safe With the Cliches Save for One Major Change

In an awkwardly cute scene, Anna and Eric stumble over each other's words at a parent/teacher conference. Aww, they're like blushing teenagers!

Six months later, Anna and Eric are in looove. Unfortunately, daughters Harper and Lily, who just so happen to hate each other, are not so enthused.

Then the fortune teller enters and the setup is complete. Anna, Tess, Harper, and Lily are all in for a rude awakening the next morning.

One Swap too Much? Accents, Actors, and a Script's Inexplicable Switch

Freakier Friday is, if nothing else, a charming collage of humorous moments—a Funny Friday mixture of misadventure and rehashed gags. But for all its zest and winsomeness, it struggles to tell a convincing story. Nothing happens as expected; more than tell a mix of slapstick aversion and subversion, the plot flails and flops and feels oddly inverted.

The main problem—the bringer of almost certain audience dissonance—comes with the swap dynamic itself. Keeping with the original, Harper does swap with her mother Anna. But alas, poor Lily (played by Sophia Hammons) isn’t so fortunate; that beauty of Asian descent and British accent awakens in the dumbfounded form of the ancient, and very Caucasian, Tess. And yes, Lily freaks. And then the moment passes.

Believability aside (any teen suddenly turned ancient elder would be in a broken comatose state for days), what really breaks that crucial suspension of belief are the two actors themselves. When “Lily” screams or schemes or laughs in Tess’ body…she never really seems like Lily…just Tess acting like a more frantic, more manic version of herself. Or rather, it just feels like Jamie Lee Curtis pretending--poorly--to be a fifteen-year-old British girl trapped in the body of a much older woman. The reverse is also the same—Lily, now inhabited by step-grandma Tess, never evokes “Tess” in the truest sense. The soul of Tess never “emerges” from the younger girl, never truly wafts from her form. Less than swapped characters and souls, they’re merely actors--Hammons and Curtis--performing alternate roles. It’s all very meta without meaning to be.

The remedy to this disconnect, of course, could have been Lily’s British accent. Why else would a character/actor from England be used/cast in the first place? After the swap, "Tess" should have begun speaking like an English woman…because it was Lily now speaking through her. And similarly, “Lily” could have begun speaking like, well, a vintage American.

But they don’t. Tess, in Lily’s form, now speaks with a British accent. And Lily, for whatever reason, speaks like an American. Odder still, the movie never acknowledges the discrepancy. What could have been a humorous opportunity to help reinforce that the two are inhabiting each other is cast aside without a clear reason why. Audiences are just expected to shrug and readjust.

On that fateful morning, the four ladies awaken in their counterpart's body. Except, whether to subvert expectations or just give Jamie Lee Curtis more to do, the swap is rather counterintuitive.

To be fair, the body swap genre, almost in spite of its itself, has always required a high-level of acting. Indeed, it’s not a trivial feat to duplicate, believably, the persona of a co-starring teen playing a hypothetical daughter. In the original Freaky Friday, actress Barbara Harris succeeded in playing the typical teenager (now stuck in her mother's body) but failed to evoke her specific counterpart, the dour Annabel Andrews. The latter, as portrayed by Jodie Foster, was always too sour, too cynical, to suddenly become the giddy, romantic bombshell Harris portrayed her as being. Similarly, in the movie Shazam!, actor Zachary Levi portrays the eponymous hero as a generic tween versus the actual character he’s supposedly representing. His performance, therefore, is never entirely convincing.

The later Freaky Friday films suffer from the same phenomenon. How does a teen actress accurately project “Mom” coping from the depths of a fifteen-year-old’s body? How does a middle-aged actress project the swagger, the chagrin, the horror, and the clumsiness of a young girl now thrust into a crusty form not really her own? Perhaps Jennifer Garner, in the delightful 13 Going on 30, came closest in capturing the zest of a teenager sudden remolded with some considerable proportions. But in Garner’s case, she only had to channel herself—a young girl turned older. A true body swap story is about the juggling of two separate souls, heaving upon the actress a double-layer of contrary personalities.

Body Swaps Require Acting Chops

More Nostalgia Bait than Truly Great

If believability was Freakier’s only sin, it would still be a good movie. The performances are otherwise fine, with the entire cast still showing a surprising range of emotion, especially the two teens (Julia Butters, Sophia Hammons). The issues, then, lie in the script—while the teens, now trapped as adults, scheme how to best make use of their predicament (to sabotage the upcoming wedding, of course), the script never quite decides what to do with the other half of the equation. Anna and Tess, now masquerading as Harper and Lily, are literally dumped in detention for some easy, pointless gags as the story carries on without them. The original film had a reason for mom, as daughter, to experience high school from the other’s viewpoint. It was to build empathy, and from that, unity, between the pair. But here, there’s nothing for Anna and Tess to learn/gain from being teens attending a day at school.

Many of these obstacles, perhaps, could have been corrected with some early restructuring; the swaps, especially between Lily and Tess, neither feel earned nor fully deserved. What if only Harper and Lily had swapped? Or, how about a three-way in that Lily becomes Anna, Anna becomes Harper, and Harper awakens as Lily? Lily (as Anna) lording herself over the two women she resents could have been funny…and meaningful.

Or, to play more on the single-parent angle, why not swap Harper and Anna…while also switching Lily with her hapless, out-of-touch father? Now that would have been a freaky story…maybe too freaky...but the film would have at least gained a stronger reason to exist.

But the peerless Jamie Lee Curtis, so integral to the original movie, couldn’t just be relegated to the background…right? As Lindsay Lohan’s original co-star, she was doubtlessly guaranteed equal billing, even if that meant having to awkwardly swap her Caucasian Tess with the Asian Lily of no biological or causal connection. It's a rather forced arrangement…and moreover, raises an interesting question/conundrum regarding the swapping of characters from two different ethnic races.

In lieu of a better or, at least, a modified script, Freakier Friday is little more than snacky nostalgia-food for fans of the original film. Those who like these kinds of films—for those who, for whatever reason, were curious what happened to Anna, her mother, and her friends—might as well buy a ticket and enjoy the shenanigans yet again. Everyone else will likely be left confused by the flip-flopping acting, antics, and dynamics of what is a largely nonsensical affair.

Does Freakier Friday, then, justify its existence, or would Disney have been wiser to just stick with another reboot? Considering this is a franchise unable, or unwilling, to explore new territory with the concept, Freakier was probably the better option. It’s familiar, it’s a copy, it’s even a parody of itself…but sequels can be that. Reboots are harder, have higher expectations, have more to do, more to prove.

But, if there ever is another Freaky redo, it'll have to be more than just this yet again. It'll have to be smarter while still containing the same humor, the same heart...that faint, unabashed schlock.- D

Indeed, why is Lily, who has no significant link to Tess (and no biological connection to the family), the one "chosen" to enter the older woman's body? What supernatural force is making these messy decisions in the first place?

As if to emphasize the contrived nature of the Tess/Lily swap, the movie then proceeds to repeat a joke from the original film in which Anna and Tess try to switch back by charging into each other. But this time, it's Lily in Tess' body and Harper in Anna's...so what good would ramming each other do? Even if it worked, they'd still be in the wrong bodies! This is all indicative of a script that, despite some funny gags, clearly needed more development time.

The movie spends a fair chunk parading Lily around in Tess' body, from playing Pickleball to buying drugs and ointments at Walgreens--all with Tess' husband. It's a little weird, especially when Lily has heretofore no connection to this stranger who would be her spouse.

Anna and Tess, now in Harper and Lily's bodies respectively, spend a good middle portion of the film in detention, then riding around eating junk food. It's amusing, in theory, but also indicative of a script that doesn't have anything better for them to do.

Lily, as Tess, comments on the pronounced absurdity of her situation. Why is she involved in this inexplicable family matter in the first place? At the very least, why has she been dumped into Tess when Harper was the obvious, most fitting choice? It's a problem the script tries to justify with a couple of fleeting scenes between the two swappees...but it's clearly a contrivance to give Curtis more to do. Why Casting chose an Asian-British hoity-toity teen for Curtis to channel, however, is even more inexplicable. Curtis is a great actress, but even she can't produce a performance that layered.

Body swap stories always die or thrive per the chops of their actors. Both actresses, more than play a mother and teen convincingly...

...must be able to mimic the performance of their acting counterpart. It isn't easy.

13 Going on 30 is one of the better examples of an actress properly embodying both a different actresses' performance along with the character beneath. It's still not a true body swap story, however...