RATING: ★★★ / ★★★★★

SUMMARY:

Anna is now a single mom raising her 15-year-old daughter, Harper, with the occasional help of her mother, Tess. However, when Anna meets Eric, the single dad of Harper’s classmate Lily whom she hates, the two start dating and get engaged six months later. A psychic at Anna’s bachelorette party causes Anna, Tess, Harper, and Lily to switch bodies, and the four must work together to switch back before the wedding.

THE GOOD:

For what is the ultimate definition of an unnecessary sequel, Freakier Friday was a surprisingly good time. Its second act, especially, is such a riot that my eyes were tearing up from how hard I was laughing. There’s just a radiance and energy emanating from the film that I found infectious, and while I found the first act rough, once the film gets going (i.e., when the four characters finally switch bodies), it really takes off.

It certainly helps that the cast, both main and side, is clearly having a great time, and the body-swapped characters spend most of the movie in pairs, meaning they can work off of each other in a way the 2003 movie didn’t have so much of. Julia Butters as Harper was a surprising cast standout, especially shining during the more heart-tugging scenes of the film.

Speaking of which, Freakier Friday tugs at the heartstrings pretty damn well, even if it doesn’t do so as naturally as its predecessor did. The third act, especially, has some very sweet moments, and anyone who cried during the original will most likely find this sequel touching as well. The themes of familial love and friendship are front and center in this film, and Baby — the love song Anna writes for her daughter Harper — is a fantastic song, one that I can’t stop listening to.

Finally, pretty much all of Freakier Friday’s callbacks to its predecessor worked for me, especially because they never feel as forced as you’d expect them to be. Admittedly, that’s most likely because Freakier Friday was always primarily conceived to appeal to the fondness many 2000s kids have for the original, but complaining about nostalgia baiting in movies just feels pointless nowadays. If you’re going to do it, I say do it well, do it smartly, and do it committedly.

THE BAD:

As funny as the body-swapping was in Freaky Friday, it also served a thematic purpose: Anna and Tess needed to walk in each other’s shoes in order to better understand each other and fix their relationship.

In Freakier Friday, however, the body swap really only occurs because the first film had a body swap. Lily swapping bodies with Tess doesn’t make much sense since the two didn’t have any real conflict, and while Harper and Anna’s mother-daughter swap makes more thematic sense on paper, the movie never takes advantage of it the way the original had. A lot of the two’s path to reconciliation feels like they could’ve happened in a different plot that had no body swap.

Keeping track of four different characters swapping bodies is also a rather heavy ask for audiences just wanting to watch a family comedy. For the first few moments, I had to constantly remind myself of who was supposed to be who, and even after those moments, remembering never came as naturally to me as it did with the first film.

That’s also because the characters of this sequel are pretty ill-defined. It’s an unfortunate consequence of how crowded this sequel is, what with it having to focus on the interrelationships of four different central characters, as well as their own lives outside of said relationships. Harper and Lily are pretty one-note teen characters, and there’s not enough contrast between the adult characters Anna and Tess, since Anna has pretty much grown up to be her own mother.

Because of that, while the jokes often work, they’re also a lot less specific to the film’s characters. Anna and Tess act less like Harper and Lily specifically and more like the general idea of a 15-year-old kid, and vice versa. Heck, many of the jokes are simply about being in a much older or much younger body, and the jokes that don’t work fail to do so because they’re overdone and hammy, like they were desperate to make you laugh for certain scenes.

The movie also suffers from a serious lack of a believable ticking time bomb. Never once did I feel like these characters were in any real rush to switch back bodies, especially because Freakier Friday takes place over two days rather than just one like the predecessor. That could’ve worked with smarter and tighter writing, but some dumb narrative decisions, as well as the third act’s decision to focus so much on the heartfelt aspects, kill any momentum the film had going for it.

VERDICT:

If all you’re looking for is a sweet, light-hearted, fun time at the movies, Freakier Friday is a pretty great choice for that kind of afternoon. It’s far from a must-watch, but I still recommend it for anyone who grew up with the 2003 Lindsay Lohan classic.