‘Freakier Friday’ Is Humiliating to Everyone Involved

No one, as far as we know, actually asked Disney for a sequel to 2003’s buoyant, surprisingly unsyrupy generation-gap comedy Freaky Friday, in which Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan—one a seasoned actress with superb comic timing, the other a teenage star poised, it seemed, for a skyrocketing career—played a mother-daughter duo who mystically swap bodies, and lives, for one day. But more than 20 years later, we’ve got one: in Freakier Friday, Curtis and Lohan return in the same roles. Curtis’ Tess is still a psychologist, only now she’s dabbling in podcasts. Lohan’s Anna has given up a career as a rock star to raise a child, now a teenager, on her own. That daughter, Harper (Julia Butters), is much more interested in surfing than in hanging out with her mom. But the person she really despises is her new stepsister-to-be, Lily (Sophia Hammons), a princessy student who’s come to Los Angeles from London and lords her alleged classiness over everyone.

In Freakier Friday, the mind-body switcheroo goes four ways, and more is less. Harper and Lily find their bodies have been taken over by Tess and Anna: The older women can stuff their faces with whatever they want, with no ill after-effects! They can ride scooters! And the teenagers are mortified to learn that they’re trapped in adult bodies—and one of those adults is actually a senior citizen. Lohan, a gifted actor whose career has had some shaky turns, is left to build a performance on her costumes, an assortment of allegedly kicky but in reality horrifically ugly teenage-girl getups. Curtis fares even worse: she’s more good-natured than she needs to be about the movie’s adult-diaper gags and jokes referencing the frequency with which old people tend to pass gas.

Freakier Friday is a movie that manages to humiliate everybody. And it appears to exist largely for one reason: to grift off the fondness many adults have for the original, even though the sequel has none of that picture’s breezy, observant charm. Worse yet, Freakier Friday isn’t even an isolated case. This summer’s releases, much like in recent years, have leaned hard on sequels and rebootings, offering ostensibly freshened versions of things we’ve seen before. There’s the Naked Gun revival starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson. Adam Sandler returns in a sequel to Happy Gilmore, more than 25 years after the original hit big. The Jurassic Park franchise has recently been rehatched with Jurassic World Rebirth. And even if the Marvel faucet is no longer gushing, there’s still no shortage of comic-book characters being reimagined for the zillionth, or even just the second or third, time: in the DC camp, there’s James Gunn’s recent Superman; in Marvel’s, The Fantastic Four: First Steps. It’s as if Hollywood—or what now passes for it—were executing a masterplan to turn us all into nostalgia zombies.

A remake or two per summer is hardly a problem, and reimagining old material is one way Hollywood has historically revitalized itself. Think of how many times A Star Is Born was remade across nearly a century, beginning with the 1937 version featuring Janet Gaynor and Frederic March (which, incidentally, riffed on some elements of an earlier film, 1932’s What Price Hollywood?) and ending, for now, with Bradley Cooper’s 2019 rendering starring Lady Gaga. There’s always a new audience that’s never even seen the older movie, and an older audience that’s happy to revisit material they’ve enjoyed before. Who doesn’t want to try to reclaim familiar pleasures?

But as the number of remakes and sequels remains steady if not increases year over year, why does our current era feel staler than ever? Hollywood has always been big business. The point has always been to pack ’em in and make money. Even so, it appears we’ve entered a new era of calculating moneygrubbing. Most of the old Hollywood studios now have a streaming component as well, and as theatrical ticket sales flounder, they’re placing bets that they can still get plenty of people to eventually watch at home. We’ve always had bad, or at least substandard, movies mixed in with great, good, or merely OK ones. But today’s mainstream movie products feel more slapdash than ever. It’s almost as if the studios/streamers making them are, by their own indifference to quality, willing people to stop caring. We’re deep in the era of the “It’s OK, it’s fine” movie.

Maybe that’s why the studios have invested so much in trying to entice us with versions of things we’ve already seen. Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a silly movie, especially in summer: Happy Gilmore 2 is exquisitely dumb, the kind of thing that makes you laugh despite your better judgment—which, after all, is the whole point of comedy. The gags in Naked Gun wear thin, but Neeson and Anderson are wonderful together.

And yet—why can’t we have new stuff? The nostalgia glut is bad for movies, and it’s bad for us. Neary everybody on the planet right now seems to be living with the idea that things were better 4—or 10, or 20, or 40—years ago. We were doing better financially; movies, books, and music were more original and fun; we were just having a much better time overall. Where did all that go? It’s natural for us to want to regress to that state of bliss, even if things weren’t really as great as we remember them. No wonder Hollywood thinks the best strategy is to help us turn back the clock.

For so many reasons, no one is optimistic these days. Though the encroaching age of artificial intelligence has its proponents (mostly in big business), almost no one engaged in the current cultural conversation wants it: we see its potential to crush human creativity. Then again, how much flowering are we seeing, anyway, in most big- or midbudget studio movies? In the larger picture, not all hope is lost: plenty of filmmakers, young and old, are still managing to make independent films almost against all odds, and there’s a new breed of studio—exemplified by Neon and A24—that seeks to give audiences movies that feel original and surprising. We’ve reached the point where a flawed picture like Ari Aster’s Eddington—a mixed-up parable about how the pandemic broke American brains, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal—feels like a cracked masterpiece. At the very least, it’s a movie with human fingerprints all over it.