Freakier Friday (2025) Disney/Comedy RT: 111 minutes Rated PG (thematic elements, rude humor, language, some suggestive references) Director: Nisha Ganatra Screenplay: Jordan Weiss Music: Amie Doherty Cinematography: Matthew Clark Release date: August 8, 2025 (US) Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Lindsay Lohan, Julia Butters, Sophia Hammons, Manny Jacinto, Mark Harmon, Chad Michael Murray, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Vanessa Bayer, X Mayo, Christina Vidal Mitchell, Haley Hudson, Ryan Malgarini, Rosalind Chao, Lucille Soong, Stephen Tobolowski, Jordan E. Cooper, Elaine Hendrix, Chloe Fineman.
Rating: **
The legacy sequel Freakier Friday is a comeback of sorts for Lindsay Lohan who hasn’t played the lead in a theatrical film since 2013’s largely unseen The Canyons. More recently, she starred in a trio of Netflix rom-coms; Falling for Christmas, Irish Wish and Our Little Secret, none of which I’ve watched. Now she’s finally ready to return to the big screen. What better place to restart her career than a sequel to one of her films from her time as a fresh-faced Disney teen. Well, it’s a safe place anyway.
Directed by Nisha Ganatra (Chutney Popcorn), Freakier Friday is a sequel to 2003’s Freaky Friday which itself was a remake of the 1976 comedy starring Jodie Foster. An older and more world-weary Lohan reunites with Jamie Lee Curtis (Everything Everywhere All at Once) as a daughter and mother who once went through a freak occurrence in switching bodies for a day. They learned a lot and got closer because of it. It happens again, but with a slight difference. They switch bodies with other people.
One of the biggest problems with Freakier Friday is that it’s convoluted. I felt like a needed a scorecard in trying to keep up with who was who. Let me break it down for you. Anna (Lohan), a music producer and manager, is a single mom raising a rebellious teen, Harper (Butters, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), with the help of her mother Tess (Curtis), a therapist who also hosts a podcast about parenting. Anna becomes romantically involved with Eric (Jacinto, The Good Place), a British restaurateur who just happens to be the father of Harper’s most hated classmate, the snooty Lily (Hammons, The Social Dilemma). Six months later, the happy couple is about to get married and the kids don’t like it one bit.
At the bachelorette party, Tess and Anna then Harper and Lily get palm readings from a supposed psychic (Bayer, SNL) who tells the girls, in a disembodied voice, “Change the hearts you know are wrong to reach the place where you belong.” This is where the confusion starts. The next day, they all wake up in different bodies. Mother and daughter switch with each other. So do grandmother and step-granddaughter-to-be. Panic immediately ensues as the younger girls try to figure out what the adults already know is happening. The usual complications follow as the four try to live each other’s lives.
There’s an added wrinkle to the already complicated situation. Harper and Lily, now in the bodies of adults, decide to call a temporary truce and work together to end their parents’ relationship. It’ll work because they’re “adults”. Harper doesn’t want to move to London and Lily wants no part of this family. The girls do everything they can even getting Anna’s ex Jake (Murray, One Tree Hill) involved in the mess.
I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the first movie back in ’03 and again this past weekend. I wanted to enjoy Freakier Friday as much. I went in with an open mind, but no amount of optimism can help this lame sequel. It strains for laughs with scenes that just aren’t funny. The bit where Anna/Harper flirts with Jake in his record store while Tess/Lily plays Cyrano de Bergerac is bizarre and a little uncomfortable. The pickle game, a pale shadow of the water skiing scene in the 1976 version, falls flat too. At times, Freakier Friday manages to be amusing. Bayer livens up every scene she’s in. She has a gift for playing flaky characters. X Mayo (The Blackening) is funny in her few scenes as the school principal. She’s the only reason the food fight scene isn’t a complete bust.
Now here’s the kicker about Freakier Friday. The movie itself is content to simply go through the motions with its contrived situations and callbacks to the first movie. HOWEVER, the actors appear to be making something of an effort. Curtis, despite not affecting an accent when taken over by the Brit teen, is game for anything. She overdoes it a bit at times, not hitting the same right beats she did in the first Friday. Lohan looks like she’s been beaten down by life, but that’s understandable considering what she went through in her teens and 20s. She still does a good job as a mom who put her dreams of being a rocker on hold to raise her kid. She’s not resentful, just restless. The chemistry between the two actresses is still there.
I just know Butters is going to be a big star somebody. I knew it when she held her own against Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood back in 2019. Her performance in Freakier Friday confirms what I already knew. She’s quite good as the laid-back surfer girl who thinks her mother is choosing her fiancee and his daughter over her. Hammons is also good as the insufferable snob only interested in fashion design and her French boyfriend. She and Butters have pretty good chemistry together.
At 111 minutes, Freakier Friday is too long. At the same time, it also manages to be half-baked with its tendency to introduce plot threads and not do much with them. At the onset, it’s established that Tess is too much in Anna’s business, always trying to outparent her. It seems like this will be a central conflict and important to the whole body switch thing. It’s not. It’s forgotten once everybody switches bodies. Shouldn’t this be resolved?
I don’t think Freakier Friday is a bad movie per se. It’s just not a very good one. It has some good ideas, but it doesn’t do anything interesting with them. The whole affair feels like a meal of warmed-up leftovers with added ingredients. It tastes a little different, but it’s not as good as it was the first night.
