Technically speaking, Lindsay Lohan has played an adult in movies. She hasn’t been a teenager since 2006, and after a number of Disney and/or teen-movie parts, she seemed downright eager to grow up, whether in service of a great director like Robert Altman, asserting her then-wobbly leading-lady rom-com skills in Just My Luck, or wading through a particularly mucky mature-audiences thriller like I Know Who Killed Me. But no one much saw any of those movies (though A Prairie Home Companion was lovely), and Lohan’s film career soon descended into cameos, obscurities, and eventually a streaming comeback that never properly situated her in anything resembling an adult world. That’s all to say that the sequel Freakier Friday lacks a certain conceptual bite in role-reversing Lohan from rebellious teenage daughter to a single mother feuding with her own rebellious daughter—then un-reversing (re-reversing?) her back into a body-swapped teenager when that daughter winds up in charge of her mom’s corporeal form. There are complications beyond those, but there’s substantial rigmarole to have Lohan shed the merest pretense of playing a mom and basically embody her recognizable teenage persona. Try as Freakier Friday might, Lohan doesn’t have much grown-up ground to push against. She’s in a body-switch movie that’s all body, and very little switch.
But Freakier Friday does have another gimmick to fall back on: Actually teaming Lohan with her co-star Jamie Lee Curtis. In the 2003 Freaky Friday (itself the latest in a long line of adaptations of a popular YA novel), Anna Coleman (Lohan) swapped bodies with her therapist mom Tess (Curtis), separating them for much of the film. Perspectives were shifted, lessons learned, pop-punk guitar lines mildly shredded. Now Anna, like her mom in the previous movie, is about to marry a nice man, this one called Eric (Manny Jacinto), while her daughter Harper (Julia Butters) pushes back on, well, everything. But Harper is especially incensed that Anna and Eric plan to move their newly blended family back to his native London, which will appease Eric’s snobby daughter Lily (Sophia Hammons). These prospective stepsisters loathe each other, which means it’s time for more perspectives, lessons, and guitar-miming.
So in a twist indicative of the movie’s frantic eagerness to please, Anna magically swaps bodies with her daughter, while Tess semi-inexplicably switches with Lily. (That must be sobering, to somehow be assigned your step-grandmother in the body-swap reconciliation process.) Though Anna and Tess sometimes squabble over the latter’s de facto co-parenting, they’re mostly on good terms, so in their teenage bodies they attempt to play by the previous movie’s arbitrary rules. That is, try to ride out the deception for a day. Harper and Lily, on the other hand, agree that this is the perfect opportunity to bust up their parents’ inconvenient nuptials, adding a reverse Parent Trap to this Lohan megamix, with Lohan and Curtis sharing far more scenes than they did in 2003. Schemes, deception, and antics ensue.
And oh, boy, do they ensue. They ensue so vigorously that Freakier Friday sometimes becomes genuinely difficult to follow. Early in the body-swap experience, director Nisha Ganatra sprints into a sequence that cross-cuts Lily (disguised as Tess, so played by Curtis) and Tess’ husband Ryan (Mark Harmon) competing in a pickleball championship with Harper (disguised as Anna, so played by Lohan) and Eric taking dancing lessons. In just a few seconds, the movie attempts to introduce two new locations, about half a dozen new characters (including two pickleball commentators and Chloe Fineman as an Australian dance instructor), and hobbies only previously mentioned in passing if at all. It adds up to a whirlwind of gags stepping on each other’s toes through some particularly flat-footed editing. Though this is probably the most dizzying example of the movie rushing through multiple subplots at once and tripping over itself, it’s far from the last. Throughout the film, locations switch half-coherently, and characters rarely make proper entrances or exits when they can disappear from the scene in question haphazardly. Basic farce mechanics do not apply; when Anna’s ex-boyfriend Jake (Chad Michael Murray) clearly pulls up to his workplace on a motorcycle, Harper and Lily naturally must end the scene by borrowing his…car.
It’s something of an accomplishment, then, that Freakier Friday is actually funnier than the original movie. Much of this improvement comes courtesy of Vanessa Bayer, as a sketchy psychic stepping in for the stereotypically magical Asian-American character played by Rosalind Chao (who re-appears here to assert her lack of interest in the emotional health of these white women, just as the movie asserts its own lack of interest in hers. Checkmate?). Bayer has maybe 10 minutes of screen time, during which she consistently kills. Maybe there wasn’t room in the movie for two scene-stealing SNL alumni; Fineman only appears long enough to get off a solid Australian “nawr” and a couple of leftover Summer Of 69 dance moves. But Lohan and Curtis do get some amusing slapstick and silliness of their own, including an enthusiastic if nonsensically staged Cyrano routine.
But even some of the movie’s opportunities for silly comedy are greeted with sloppiness. Why, for example, doesn’t Curtis-as-Lily speak with an English accent? (Maybe accents involve some muscle memory, but are they really inherent to a body?) Instead, the movie just has Curtis use some English slang in an American accent, which mostly serves to highlight how the body swaps in this movie have little to distinguish them from the earlier film, beyond Curtis and Lohan being older. They play their multiple parts with gusto, but they haven’t gained much precision in these roles over the past two decades and change. When this nearly two-hour movie enters its intentionally laughless final stretch, Freakier Friday feels more and more like the extended encore of a reunion concert—not least because that’s essentially where it takes place. Rather than celebrating a beloved family film, the sequel is a reminder of how short of a setlist can be derived from Lohan’s greatest movie hits.
Director: Nisha Ganatra
Writers: Jordan Weiss
Starring: Lindsay Lohan, Jamie Lee Curtis, Julia Butters, Sophia Hammons, Manny Jacinto, Vanessa Bayer
Release Date: August 8, 2025
