‘FREAKIER FRIDAY’ Escapes the Content Mines of Disney+ to Pollute the Theater

Live-action Disney movies have shuffled back into theaters with Freakier Friday, a legacy sequel to a remake that sees Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan reprise their body-swapped mother-daughter roles from the 2003 film. Originally slated for Disney+, this Nisha Ganatra-directed cash-in is a strong argument for why some things really ought to stay on the small screen. Mostly because they stink. Everything is pitched at such a shrieky, shrill, over-glossed, sugar-rush volume with such broad, nose-clowning humor that it’s clearly designed for that special breed of Disney Adult, the kind who, like Peter Pan, simply never grew up and probably spent their honeymoon alongside Mickey and Minnie Mouse.

It’s been 22 years since Tess (Curtis) and Anna (Lohan) traded corporeal forms for a day. In the interim, Anna’s had a daughter whom she’s co-parented with Tess…apparently on purpose. The mom-daughter age gap was gnawing at me so I ran the numbers: if 22 years have passed between films and Anna is 36 here, that means she got pregnant prettttyyy soon after the events of the first movie. Not here to disparage teen moms, but it’s safe to say the psychological aftermath of switching bodies with her own mother sent Anna down a very particular path. So then there was Harper (Julia Butters). Her character traits include liking to surf and…hmm, that’s about it.

At school, Harper beefs with lab partner Lily (Sophia Hammons), a London-transplanted fashionista. A volatile class experiment ends with them both in the principal’s office, a perfect setting for a meet-cute between Harper’s mom and Lily’s dad, Eric (Manny Jacinto). Their relationship quickly blossoms over a montage of Polaroid pictures and the two enemy-girls are soon staring down the horror of becoming stepsisters. Tensions grow over where the soon-to-be blended family will live: either here in California or back to London. Naturally, the testy teens launch a sabotage campaign to split the happy couple before their impending nuptials.

At Anna’s bachelorette, likely the least fun bachelorette party ever committed to film, the three generations of women encounter a bargain-bin psychic with a side hustle in business cards and barista-ing who spins some woo-woo about overlapping palm lines and chants an incantation that leads to…another body swap. Now the four of them are crisscrossed in each other’s bodies with Anna and daughter Harper and Tess and Lily all switching places. With the wedding just days away, the teens (now inhabiting Curtis and Lohan) are now in a great position to derail their parent’s romance, while the moms (now in their daughters’ bodies) rediscover the sugar-fueled highs of living without joint pain or caloric consequences while trying to coerce the kiddos into living up to their adult responsibilities.

The script from Jordan Weiss brings in a number of runtime-lengthening subplots: an old folks pickleball tournament; woes with Anna’s client, a pop star (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) publicly grieving a breakup on tour; Anna’s secret dream to write and perform her music even though she’s a…mom!; an ex-boyfriend (Chad Michael Murray) with a GILF fixation. It’s all overstuffed and undercooked, padded with montages that substitute for anything resembling character development or emotional investment.

The writing is painfully obvious: old jokes, young jokes, groaners about wrinkles and ungrateful teens. It’s like a Greatest Hits album of tired tropes, without a single fresh gag or one inspired set piece to tie it all together. The pacing is truly sluggish, the plot is dragged forward by sheer inconvenience, and everything feels like a first draft no one wanted to touch again. I may have managed the odd light laugh or two, but mostly the experience is deeply cringe.

I will admit: I’m not the target audience for this kind of stuff. But I’m also not convinced this film deserves one. It seems aimed at millennials who still harbor affection for the original —and maybe they were the ones busting a gut in the theater — but I never managed to get remotely on that wavelength. This brand of nostalgia-baiting content generation is nothing new, but when it’s done in this slapdash of a manner, it’s hard not to feel straight up, well, baited. Kudos to those who can just take whatever is shoveled their way but the IP slop just doesn’t go down easy.

Jamie Lee Curtis does a commendable job rolling with the absurdity, self-effacing jokes, and physical humor, but it’s in service of such a stupid script that it’s hard to actually enjoy what she’s doing. At least she manages to rifle through a number of dazzling outfit changes that at least suggest that there was some fun had behind-the-scenes. And while there is something admittedly nostalgic about seeing child actor–turned–troubled teen–turned–Netflix veteran Lindsay Lohan back on the big screen, her performance proves why she’s been largely relinquished to the streamers. She’s not bad per se. She just only really has one setting.

Manny Jacinto is charming enough as the romantic lead, and the young actresses are solid—Butters, especially, handles dramatic moments with more finesse than Lohan. But what talent could have flared here is instead funneled into over-smoothed beige content generation. At least the film doesn’t drown in callbacks and references though I’m fairly certain a few characters from the original make an appearance. Confirming that however would require a Wikipedia search I have zero interest in doing because I can’t muster the enthusiasm to see why it would matter. I watched Freaky Friday once, 22 years ago and I watched this sequel because Weapons wasn’t screening for critics—and that is more than enough.

Not to put too fine a point on it but Freakier Friday is yet another symptom of our current entertainment disease: legacy sequels that exist purely to recycle intellectual property, saddled with some old stars and just enough Gen-Z faces to justify the resurrection. But movies like this are not film; they are content. Empty, ugly, algorithm-approved content. No risks, no real storytelling, no perspective, just a recycled concept in a thinner, louder, glossier, and often more annoying form. Most of us grew up and moved on. The winsome cast almost salvages the thing through sheer force of will, but even if the ending sort of works on the most basic screenwriting level, the whole thing still lands with a soggy, indifferent shrug. Wasted opportunity with a 26 million dollar budget. This one should’ve stayed on streaming. Instead, you can suffer through it in a proper theater with other Disney adults.