Freakier Friday - Movie Review

Freakier Friday is directed by Nisha Ganatra and stars Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis once again and is the follow-up to the 2003 remake that I dearly love. So 22 years after Tess and Anna endured an identity crisis, Anna now has a daughter and is soon to be stepdaughter. As they navigate the challenges that come when two families merge, Tess and Anna discover that Like I said at the start of the video, I've always loved the 2003 Freaky Friday. Lindsay Lohan had a really good little streak of remakes there between that and The Parent Trap, both films that I do like more than the originals. Back in the day, Disney actually used to produce a lot of really good quality live-action movies quite often. Nowadays you got to wait a long time for the occasional Togo or The Young Woman in the Sea, but in the 90s and the early 2000s, you got all kinds of really good live-action produced movies. Freakier Friday reminded me of a time when they were actually putting out really good live-action movies and not just through touchstone pictures, but actually branded by Disney. This film does feel like it came out in the mid-2000s. Obviously I'm a 90s kid at heart, but I was a 2000s teen, so movies like Freaky Friday, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, the occasional Hilary Duff film were definitely viewed by me a lot and I did watch the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network on repeat, and so there were aspects of Freakier Friday that made me feel very, very nostalgic. But also, there were like a ton of young kids at this screening and they all really seemed to enjoy themselves, and I was looking at these kids thinking that they just don't really get to see a lot of films made at this budget level that are fantasy comedies based off of a high concept, because we used to get high concept comedies all the time. The Liar Liars, The Bruce Almighty's of the World, Blast from the Past. High concept comedies don't come around that much anymore, and if they do, they're usually not given the type of budget that this film has. Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis are once again really great together. There's a lot of fun, of course, in the initial body swap moment when they're all looking at themselves in the mirror and realizing the horror of what they've had to go through. And the same things that worked in the first film work here, where all of them are forced to deal with their various lives and how things are changing. But since there is now a daughter and future stepdaughter at play, and they're also swapping places, and they hate each other, you have an extra layer of things that's going on here. And I'll admit that at first, for like the first few minutes, I did have to kind of be like, okay, I got it now. But it took like a second. This is also that rare years later sequel that still has the legacy characters, but they're integral to the plot. In fact, they're front and center. They're not pushed to the background. And the new characters for younger audiences are not completely insufferable. It's wonderful. Julia Butters, in particular, I thought was great. The difference between her at the start of the movie and after she becomes her mother was very noticeable, and there's a lot of great comedy there. One of my favorite things about this movie, though, is there's this awkward storyline in the first film, where young Chad Michael Murray, like high school-aged Chad Michael Murray, is getting close to Jamie Lee Curtis, because Jamie Lee Curtis is really Lindsay Lohan, and she's crushing on him. And it's weird because of the age difference, you know? In this movie, Chad Michael Murray is an adult now, and so they get to play off of that dynamic in a very fun way. There is a portion of the beginning of the second act, though, that dragged just a bit, and I think it's because the original structure worked so well with two people switching, and now you've got four people switching, and you've got to go between all of them. And that does add some runtime. And sometimes you're looking at things they're doing and thinking, that is far more interesting and more embarrassing and awkward, and the comedy here works for me. And over here, they're in detention, and they're getting to know each other, and they were fighting before, but now they have to work together to scrub gum off of the bottom of bleachers. And some of that stuff just isn't as interesting as what Lohan and Curtis are doing. But the movie picks up considerably towards the end of that second act, and into the third act, all the way to the end. And I did find myself actually feeling somewhat emotional. Like, it actually had a very good message for parenting, and how you can look at your situation, especially if you've lost a parent. The first film does that very well, too. This isn't necessarily ground that hasn't been tread before. It's just that the movie did it very effectively. And I will always be a sucker for mid-budget comedies with high concepts that are playing in theaters. Between this and Naked Gun, I feel like comedies are having a really nice little moment on the big screen, and hope you guys check it out. If you did like the original, I feel like you'll probably find a lot to like here. Nisha Ganatra does a really good job behind the camera. Her film Late Night was pretty good, too. She's a good filmmaker, and I do think this film is worth seeing, especially if you are a 90s or 2000s kid or teen like me. I'm not a teenager anymore, but I was once. Guys, thank you so much, as always, for watching. Look forward to more videos very soon. 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