Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Film | August 11, 2025
Film critic Stephanie Zacharek took some heat last week after Jamie Lee Curtis clapped back at a negative review she wrote for Time. “Freaky Friday is humiliating to everyone involved,” read the headline, while Zacharek added in the review, “No one, as far as we know, actually asked Disney for a sequel to 2003’s buoyant, surprisingly unsyrupy generation-gap comedy Freaky Friday.”
“SEEMS a TAD HARSH. SOME people LOVE it. Me being one,” Jamie Lee Curtis replied to the Time magazine post on Instagram.
First off: Jamie Lee Curtis spends too much time on social media, and actors and filmmakers shouldn’t reply to critics. It’s like fighting with commenters: Don’t do it! Speaking from plenty of experience, I can tell you it never works out. You say what you want to say (in the form of the film), the critic says what she wants to say (in the form of a review), never the twain shall meet, and no one makes any unnecessary headlines.
To be fair to Zacharek — who won a Pulitzer Prize a decade ago for her criticism at The Village Voice — I doubt many people actually did ask for a sequel to Freaky Friday. But then again, who but a studio executive trying to keep their job asks for any of these IP sequels? It’s not a matter of who wants them — they’re here! They’re happening! There’s no getting around it. The question is whether these sequels being forced upon us are any good.
And it’s there where I will respectfully disagree with Zacharek. Freakier Friday may not be as good as the original, but it’s a marketing triumph. The film is better than most remakes of remakes, and certainly superior to most of the straight-to-streaming retreads of ’90s and early aughts teen flicks. It’s not a movie that necessarily warrants a theatrical release, but there’s a reason it made $30 million in its opening weekend: It’s a good movie for parents to take their tweens and teenagers to. There are plenty of movies for parents and their small kids, and I take my older kid — who loves horror and adult films — to the theater three or four times a month. But while I watch a lot of television with my teenage daughters, this is the first film I’ve seen in theaters with them since Wicked. And I know I wasn’t the only parent among my friends to take their daughter or daughters to see Freakier Friday (it helps that the original was a favorite in our house).
It’s not nearly as funny as the original, but it is sweeter and a little more heartfelt, probably because it was designed to appeal to parents as much as teens and tweens this time around. Curtis, Lindsay Lohan, Chad Michael Murray, and Mark Harmon return for the older set, while the younger crowd gets recognizable faces like Maitreyi Ramakrishnan (Never Have I Ever). It’s really well packaged, as they say.
It’s also modestly entertaining. “It’s cute. I liked it,” was the professional opinion of my daughters — not exactly a ringing endorsement, but certainly more positive than “it’s humiliating to everyone involved.” I saw very little evidence of humiliation. It’s the best thing Lohan has done in two decades. Manny Jacinto is surprisingly good (and handsome!) as the film’s heart, and while Jamie Lee Curtis can definitely be too much online, she’s a very good actress who knows her way around the role, even if she’s playing a teenage girl who swapped bodies with a grandmother this time around.
The body swapping is not as symmetrically satisfying this time. Tess (Curtis) and her daughter, Anna (Lohan), swap bodies with Lohan’s daughter, Julia (Harper Coleman), and Lohan’s stepdaughter-to-be, Lily (Sophia Hammons). Anna is set to marry Eric (Manny Jacinto), a handsome British chef and widower who recently moved to Los Angeles with his daughter Lily, who decidedly does not get along with Julia. After the wedding, Eric and Anna must decide whether to stay in Los Angeles (for Julia) or move to London (for Lily). Ahead of the wedding, there’s a body swap, and Julia and Lily try to sabotage the nuptials so no choice will have to be made, but along the way — naturally — Julia and Lily bond as the sisters they need to be, and Tess and Anna grow even closer.
It is silly and very much a movie of the early aughts, but veteran television comedy director Nisha Ganatra gives it all the sitcom trappings it warrants, breathes a few fresh notes into the nostalgia, and even manages to hit the parents in the audience squarely in their feels a couple of times.
I don’t like algorithmically generated movies (like The Pickup) that try so hard not to alienate anyone they become bland paste, but I’m less bothered by a marketing-driven movie that aims to honestly appeal to a particular demo — here, parents and their older kids. The kids get the high-concept body swap, the parents get the emotional ending, and we all get to share popcorn together. Maybe no one asked for a sequel to Freaky Friday, but no one asked for Paddington 2 or Top Gun: Maverick, either, and that turned out OK.
