In Freakier Friday, the Coleman family faces a new body-swapping adventure. Years after Tess and Anna’s original switch, Anna, now a mom, is blending her family with her fiancé’s. A mysterious fortune teller at Anna’s bachelorette party triggers chaos, swapping Tess, Anna, Anna’s daughter Harper, and soon-to-be stepdaughter Lily into unexpected bodies, setting off a multigenerational mix-up.

Freakier Friday Review

The 1976 Freaky Friday and its 2003 remake nailed a timeless concept: mutual respect born from walking in each other’s shoes. The 2003 version wasn’t gunning for Oscars with its breezy script or lofty ideas, but it had enough charm, heart, and relatability to make it a go-to for mothers and daughters. It was silly, fun, and just poignant enough to hit home. Enter Freakier Friday, where the writing team—whose combined five credits include gems you’ve never heard of—completely fumbles the ball.

The swap, once a driver of meaningful growth, is now just a flimsy excuse for a barrage of low-hanging gags, mostly poking at the fact that the 2003 actresses, Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan, are now 20 years older. The humor leans heavily on their age for cheap laughs. Curtis’s character swaps with her soon-to-be step-granddaughter, a girl she barely knows, with no real conflict to resolve through the swap. Lohan swaps with her daughter, but their only tension—a half-baked plan to move to London post-wedding—feels like a shrug. The real clash, between Lohan’s daughter and her soon-to-be stepdaughter, who spend 99% of the film as selfish, narcissistic brats hurling petty insults at each other, gets no swap-driven resolution. Unlike the 2003 teen with legitimate gripes, these girls are so unlikable that you’re rooting against them. Their eventual truce comes from forced time together and shared goals, not from any profound perspective shift. The swap is pointless, a lazy plot device for juvenile humor.

Speaking of humor, who’s this movie even for? The bulk of the film centers on Curtis and Lohan, inhabited by teenagers, delivering childish gags and simplistic jokes that might tickle tween girls. But are tweens clamoring to watch two actresses now in their 40s and 60s joke about incontinence? Meanwhile, fans of the 2003 film, now 20 years older, likely won’t vibe with the relentless silliness aimed at a younger crowd. The target audience is as muddled as the rest of the film.

The performances don’t save it. Characters, when there’s been one or two minutes without a gag, forget they’re in bodies decades older or younger, despite days spent as one another and plenty of moments that should’ve cemented the reality. That’s on the writers. More baffling is Jamie Lee Curtis, an Oscar winner, playing a 17-year-old girl like a nine-year-old with brain damage. It’s jarring, but something that director Nisha Ganatra should have caught and put a stop to.

Add in stray subplots—like a cameo from Lohan’s ex from the 2003 film—that go nowhere or are for easy and unearned third-act conflict, a pile of easy resolutions, and a dragged-out 1-hour-51-minute runtime, and Freakier Friday is pure nostalgia bait with no substance. It banks on your love for the original while serving a confused mess of goofballery that doesn’t know who it’s trying to entertain.

PARENTAL NOTES

PG Family Film?

• One of the first bits is Jamie Lee Curtis screaming the crowned daddy of cursewords, only to have it cut off because she’s old and doesn’t get technology. However, she manages to get out “mother fu…”
• Another character says, “piss off.”
• Jamie Lee Curtis, possessed by a teenage child, tells Lindsay Lohan to “hop in my b!t@h.”
• There’s a gag involving enemas

WOKE REPORT

Annoying References

• Cultural Appropriation
• Global warming
• “Prepare to be triggered.”
• Co-grandparenting
• “How can anyone hate California?” is asked unironically. (I’m not sure that one constitutes wokeness as much as simple stupidity)
• Lohan tells her daughter and soon-to-be stepdaughter that she is going to braid their hair in a “non-cultural appropriating way.”
• We’re told that prison is “bad at stopping recidivism” and given a short lecture on leftist prison reform.

Choosing to be a Single Parent

• I lost count of the times that Jamie Lee Curtis’s adult character told the audience that Lindsay Lohan’s adult character “chose to be a single mother.” We aren’t ever given a reason why. We don’t know who the father is or anything about him, and his absence is never an emotional issue for anyone. Instead, it’s a cheap and easy contrivance for Lohan’s character to be single early in the film.
  • In Freaky Friday, Jamie Lee Curtis was a widow, and her husband’s passing was woven into the admittedly limited emotional core. We learned that he had been a good man, and Curtis’s character wanted to honor and respect him even as she moved on. In Freakier Friday, the dad is essentially a sperm donor.
  • Finally, implicit in the choice is that it was optional. Ostensibly, this means that Lohan’s character made a conscious decision to rob her daughter of having a father.

Career over Children

• One of the film’s repeated themes is that of the adult Lindsay Lohan character having had to give up her career as a rock star to be a mother. How she can have “chosen” to be a single mother, but is also somehow a victim of motherhood, is never explained. I guess it’s nice that at least she didn’t abort the baby to keep her career. Of course, there’d be no movie if she had.
  •  One of the key moments for Lohan’s daughter comes when, while in her mother’s body, she realizes that her mom likely resented her for the career change (after all, she would). Lohan’s adult character never says this outright, but it’s framed as a moment of clarity for the teen—and treated as a healthy revelation. It’s not portrayed as a loving sacrifice freely made, but as something forced upon Lohan’s character. Once the daughter grasps the burden she must have been, she shows a noticeable step toward maturity.
  • Full disclosure, the film is inconsistent with this topic. By the end of Freakier Friday, Lohan reveals how happy she is to have been a mom this whole time. The revelation of resentment was never openly expressed by her in the film, only by the daughter, and it was never quite refuted. Yet, it’s also hinted at being true with a ridiculous and nonsensical plot point. Basically, it’s as messy as the rest of the film.

Cultural Sensitivity

• The 2003 original initiates the body swap via a nosy and somewhat cartoony Chinese mother and her goofy asian mysticism, but you can’t have that in 2025. It’s culturally insensitive. What is ok is a moronic white Starbucks barista who’s a full-time goober and part-time palm reader who accidentally fumbles her way into performing a body swap that doesn’t make any narrative or thematic sense.
  • Oh, and both of the original asian actresses have cameos in the movie. So, it’s not as though the filmmakers needed to come up with a new mechanism for the transformation.