Freakier Friday Parent Guide

Years after her body-switching adventure, Anna (Lindsay Lohan) is a busy single mom juggling her career and parenting an ornery teenager, Harper (Julia Butters). Her mom, Tess (Jamie Lee Curtis), does everything she can to help, but sometimes gets in the way of Anna’s efforts. After an incident at school, Anna meets Eric (Manny Jacinto), the father of Harper’s rival, Lily (Sophia Hammons), and sparks fly. Months later the two are engaged, but their daughters still can’t get along, especially as the soon-to-be-blended families discuss where they’ll live.

As tensions rise in the days before the wedding, the four women meet a fortune teller and wake up in each other’s bodies. While Anna and Tess pretend to be teens, Harper and Lily hatch a plan to break up their parents for good.

My formative years being the early 2000s, Lindsay Lohan was a childhood icon for me. Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen was my entire personality for longer than I’d like to admit and Freaky Friday was regular viewing in my household. So as someone with a deep nostalgia for the original, I had reservations going into this sequel but held a tiny glimmer of hope that it might possibly be watchable. I am shocked to report that Freakier Friday is not only watchable; it’s actually good.

If you’ve seen the original, you’ll know what to expect regarding tone and quality. We’re not here for Oscar-level filmmaking, we’re looking for some slap stick laughs, heartfelt moments, and Chad Michael Murray being somehow better looking in his 40s than he was in his 20s. The writers manage to capture the humor and heart that made the original work, and Lohan and Curtis’s chemistry has only improved with age. There are some good laughs, and I’ll admit that I was a little teary-eyed at the emotional climax.

I personally have a hard time with cringe-based humor, so there were a few scenes that caused me some strong secondhand embarrassment, but that’s to be expected with this premise. Although the writers do the best they can, having four people body-swapped can be confusing at times, and I had to keep reminding myself who was actually who. I would also have preferred tighter editing to keep the story more streamlined and reduce the runtime.

With strong messages around family, empathy, and selflessness, Freakier Friday is better than a lot of family films, though I will say that the PG rating doesn’t mean it’s suitable for very young audiences. Some of the jokes are on the mature side, and the overall themes are going to go over young children’s heads. For tweens, teens, and adults, however, it’s a fun, easy watch with great performances and a good hit of early aught’s nostalgia.

About author

Savannah Sillito

Savannah Sillito is a librarian with a master's in library science, a bachelor's degree in English, and a certificate in early childhood education. She enjoys nonfiction books, travel, and is a staunch proponent of the Oxford comma.