Freakier Friday review – puppyishly uninhibited Jamie Lee Curtis saves body-swap sequel | Movies

Nobody may very well be gamer or goofier than Jamie Lee Curtis on this newest twist within the Freaky Friday body-swap franchise; she finds some distinctly likable kind, performs broad comedy to the hilt and just about carries the film – with the assistance of some good supporting cameo turns – when her co-star Lindsay Lohan isn’t precisely nailing the laughs. And it ought to be stated that as an essay in different existences and parallel realities, this movie and Curtis’s starring function are way more attention-grabbing than the bafflingly overrated Oscar-winner All the pieces In every single place All at As soon as.The previous movie, from 2003, had Curtis and Lohan as a quarrelling mom and daughter who swap our bodies because of the hilarious magical otherness of Chinese language fortune cookies. (In 2025, the brand new model is a bit culturally lairy of gags like that.) It’s based mostly on Mary Rodgers’s 1972 novel, first filmed in 1976 with Jodie Foster because the daughter, a formidably precocious younger star who was in these days thought of to be already body-swapped into fierce maturity. The publicity for this movie guarantees legacy cameos and when one teen character talks about her French boyfriend, many FF followers can have been excitably questioning if this French boyfriend has a French-speaking mother performed by a sure French-speaking star?On this new modern actuality, written by Jordan Weiss and directed by Nisha Ganatra, Curtis’s character Tess Coleman is a grandma, therapist and parenting podcaster, and her once-tearaway daughter, Lohan’s character Anna, is a music producer and single mother to a Gen-Z teen; that is Harper, performed by Julia Butters, a younger actor nonetheless legendary for her scene reverse Leonardo DiCaprio in Tarantino’s As soon as Upon a Time in Hollywood.When Harper has an enormous battle at school along with her obnoxious, princess-y British lab companion, Lily (performed by non-Briton Sophia Hammons), she is horrified when Anna falls exhausting for Lily’s scorching single dad Eric (Manny Jacinto); these enemies are each appalled on the prospect of turning into stepsisters. This case turns into much more sophisticated – freakier the truth is – when a zany palm reader and fortune teller triggers a brand new cosmic body-swap nightmare, this time involving 4 girls, not two.One other model of this film may need wished to dip its toe into the problems of physique picture and identification: Freakier Friday retains it mild, partly because of Curtis’s jokey grandma, in whose knockabout generational presence there isn’t a query of something tough. Curtis will get the laughs along with her puppyishly uninhibited efficiency and there are some nice gags, together with one on the expense of parents who use a sure social media platform. There are additionally some amusing contributions from SNL trouper Vanessa Bayer because the fortune teller, comic X Mayo as the college’s dyspeptic principal and Santina Muha as a US official who has to evaluate the authenticity of Anna and Eric’s marriage.As for Lohan, she does an inexpensive job, though her personal body-swapped standing because the legendary wild-child of outdated who’s now taking part in a careworn middle-aged individual has to stay unemphasised, just because Lohan doesn’t actually have the comedy chops. It’s Curtis who embodies the story’s wacky spirit. Freakier Friday is out on 7 August in Australia and eight August within the UK and US.