During the first 15 minutes of Freakier Friday, a sequel to the popular 2003 movie, a food fight disrupts a high school bake sale. As the sloppy mayhem unfolded, I surrendered any hope that this broadly played cinematic reunion tour for Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan would bubble with Wildean wit.
Working from a screenplay credited to a trio of writers, director Nisha Ganatra doubles the number of characters involved in body swaps from two to four, but that that doesn't make her movie any better than its predecessor. Sadly it's probably not as good.
This time, the body-swapping adventures of Curtis and Lohan are joined by Julia Butters, as the daughter of Lohan's now-grown Anna, and Sophie Hammons, as Lily, a teenager who'll be blended into a new family should Anna go through with her plan to marry Lily's father, a widowed British restaurateur played by Manny Jacinto.
Ganatra keeps things peppy as she builds toward the inevitable body swaps, this time resulting from the unwanted help of a faux psychic (Vanessa Bayer).
The idea behind the plot goes something like this: Both teenagers (Butters and Hammons) despise one another and have no desire to become stepsisters. Once they find themselves in different bodies, they follow a sitcom playbook, scheming to derail Anna and Eric's impending wedding.
Lohan and Butters do well, with Curtis' broader performance adding dashes of slapstick. Hammons ably fulfills her obligations as a conceited London-raised teenager who hasn't gotten over the death of her mother. Lohan's Anna, by the way, opted for single motherhood long before the story began.
All of this rattles on for one hour and 51 minutes while the characters learn how to resolve their problems.
Look, because there's no suspense about how the movie will end, I don't consider it a spoiler to tell you that a truly freaky movie would have put Butters' 15-year-old Harper in her 36-year-old mother's body indefinitely, skipping the end of adolescence for the entrapments of middle age.
Too freaky? I suppose so.
The movie has other things in mind as it works to generate feel-good spirit, culminating with a showy musical production number involving Lohan, Butters, and a singer (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) Anna manages. Anna, we learn, became a talent agent after abandoning performing ambitions she displayed in the earlier movie, partly to concentrate on being a mom.
Perhaps to provide connection points for those who loved the 2003 movie, the filmmakers contrive small roles for additional returnees, notably Stephen Tobolowsky, as an aging teacher, Chad Michael Murray, as Anna's old high school flame, and Mark Harmon, as Tess's husband.
The movie's end credits feature outtakes that suggest the movie was fun to make. The performances capture some of that giddy flavor, but Freakier Friday wraps its family-oriented sentiments in a package that 22 years of aging hasn't done much to improve.*
*For the record, I haven't seen the 1976 version of Freaky Friday that starred Jodie Foster and Barbara Harris.
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