No one could be gamer or goofier than Jamie Lee Curtis in this latest twist in the Freaky Friday body-swap franchise; she finds some distinctly likable form, plays broad comedy to the hilt and pretty much carries the movie – with the help of some nice supporting cameo turns – when her co-star Lindsay Lohan isn’t exactly nailing the laughs. And it should be said that as an essay in alternative existences and parallel realities, this film and Curtis’s starring role are far more interesting than the bafflingly overrated Oscar-winner Everything Everywhere All at Once.
The preceding film, from 2003, had Curtis and Lohan as a quarrelling mother and daughter who swap bodies due to the hilarious magical otherness of Chinese fortune cookies. (In 2025, the new version is a bit culturally wary of gags like that.) It is based on Mary Rodgers’s 1972 novel, first filmed in 1976 with Jodie Foster as the daughter, a formidably precocious young star who was in those days considered to be already body-swapped into fierce adulthood. The publicity for this film promises legacy cameos and when one teen character talks about her French boyfriend, many FF fans will have been excitably wondering if this French boyfriend has a French-speaking mom played by a certain French-speaking star?
