Jonah Naplan   August 8, 2025

It will surprise almost nobody that “Freakier Friday,” a reboot arriving 22 years after the original Disney teen cult classic, is formulaic from beginning to end, because the filmmakers know exactly what their target audience wants to see and are perfectly happy with sticking to what works. It’s a “bigger” (or “freakier”) movie than the original, like so many of these reboots are, adding new characters, plot details, and modern twists in order to satisfy the diminished attention spans of contemporary audiences. Not for nothing does the title seem to suggest exaggerated plotting and a new annotation on a story we already know and love. The additions are all charming enough, even if the screenplay feels over-stuffed on the whole. But most importantly, everyone—returning actors Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis and all the newbies alike—seems to be having a blast on-screen, obliging us to have fun, too.

Directed by Nisha Ganatra, working from a screenplay by Jordan Weiss, “Freakier Friday” picks up with our characters who’ve all gotten older and developed an extended family in Los Angeles. Anna Coleman (Lohan) has a teenage daughter named Harper (Julia Butters, who has already starred in movies like “The Fabelmans” and “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” both of which also take place in LA, too), whose rebellious streak is a direct reflection of her mother’s from 2003. Anna’s mom, therapist Tess Coleman (Curtis), has taken up podcasting—a common adult hobby in a lot of these reboots—and still lives with her husband whom she married in the first “Freaky Friday,” Ryan (Mark Harmon). The plot is spun into motion when Anna quite literally runs into a man named Eric Reyes (Manny Jacinto) while on her way to meet with Harper’s principal, and immediately falls in love. A scrapbook-inspired montage illustrates the trajectory of their relationship over six months, and before you know it, they’re engaged. There’s just one problem: Eric’s daughter Lily (Sophia Hammons), whom Harper is in school with and despises. If these two single parents are to be married, then they’re all going to move to London as one family, which Harper cannot bear imagining.

But the movie can’t dwell on this exposition for too long because there’s body-swapping to be done! “Freakier Friday” kind of screws itself over from the very beginning by having four switches instead of just two. It was challenging enough keeping track of the reversal of personalities and character tics all those years ago when it was just Anna and Tess in this scenario, so it’s much harder yet to follow twice as many characters, two of which are brand new and who we don’t really know that well. It doesn’t sound too complicated on paper—Anna and Harper switch bodies, while Tess and Lily switch bodies—but it’s far more convoluted in execution. Not to mention all of the other characters we have to follow, too, including Eric, Ryan, and Jake (a returning Chad Michael Murray), Anna’s love interest from the first film. There’s simply not room for all of them in this 111-minute movie, and so Ganatra picks and chooses who gets the fullest arc, and who gets an incomplete one.

Everyone’s having a visible blast, though. Curtis, in particular, has chosen projects recently that allow her to explore her non-serious side. She reprised her iconic role as Laurie Strode in a recent trilogy of “Halloween” remakes, won an Oscar for playing a quirky IRS agent in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” and now she’s returning to the material that helped to solidify her as an icon of pop culture. Lohan feels somewhat reinvented by this movie, too, having been a major star in the early 2000s but facing a major downfall due to addiction and legal crises in the years that followed. She’s returned to acting recently with Netflix movies like “Irish Wish” and “Our Little Secret” and now this one, which immediately reminds us of her charm with an opening sequence that establishes the woman Anna has become and her struggles with understanding her daughter.

The movie is filled with wonderful moments where Lohan and Curtis truly get to riff off each other even if they’re not exactly “themselves.” The term for it is “millennial humor,” and it will appeal to middle-aged moms, and perhaps their moms, who will laugh out loud at the situations this mother and daughter get thrown into. Sure, they’re technically supposed to be teenagers, but they also just feel like Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis. Butters and Hammons struggle to hold their own against these legends, despite technically playing them. Both characters are largely nondescript and don’t do a whole lot to highlight the inherent humor that comes with teenage actors playing adults, one of which is a senior citizen.

And yet, even as “Freakier Friday” mostly fails to interrogate age in any sort of meaningful way, there’s still something about it that’s charming as a piece of summer entertainment. It follows a lot of the same tropes that these legacyquels do by rehashing most of the same beats as the original (it’s essentially “Freaky Friday” with modern needle drops and pop culture references), but the concept of body-switching is already used so often in media (even before the first movie came out in 2003, there was a 1976 “Freaky Friday” starring a young Jodie Foster) that its similarities can be earnestly overlooked. I hope that both Curtis and Lohan will find projects in the future that are original and use their charms in new ways, but, sure, this one will do in a pinch.

Now playing in theaters.