Well, well, we’ll look who scored a ticket to a press screening of Freakier Friday! This little blog through no affiliation with the actual blog at all! Which is to say, yes, I found myself at an embargoed screening of a major motion picture release. And yes, I decided I must find a way to participate in the fun of it, bringing me back here after so many months away. Although, I do feel a little bit like the crewman in the lifeboat at the end of Titanic.

Let me be brief here because I’m sure there are several reviews you can read from qualified critics being released at the same time as this one, Lindsay Lohan is back y’all! I don’t care about some Netflix holiday whatever, this is her comeback and it is magnificent! 

Paired again with national treasure and Academy Award winner, Jamie Lee Curtis, Lohan not only shines comedically, but also masterfully navigates the films more heart wrenching moments. Like its predecessor, this movie is about grief and new beginnings. Lohan’s Anna is due to wed British national, Eric (The Good Place’s Manny Jacinto), and struggling to navigate the blending of two single parent households into one nuclear family. Anna’s daughter, Harper (Julia Butters), is close with Curtis’s “Grams,” who 2003 viewers may know better as Tess. And not only does she hate her would-be step-sister, played by Sophia Hammons, but she hates the thought of moving to London even more. 

Thank God, a Starbucks Barista multi-hyphenate psychic, played by Vanessa Bayer, intervenes with a four way body switch. (And I do appreciate that the sequel acknowledges the inherent body horror of this by playing with some horror movie editing in a light way that shouldn’t be too scary for most kids but definitely would have freaked me out in kindergarten). 

Somehow, Freakier Friday manages to be both funnier and more heartfelt than the original. It made me cry three times and that’s only because I was too busy laughing during every other moment of this film. And there’s plenty of fan service here, all the OG members of Pink Slip are back, Marc Harmon is still the guy you’re glad your mom married, and the kids are still attending Sunset Ridge with Stephen Tobolowsky’s Mr. Bates (who tragically cannot retire due to the school district investing his retirement fund in crypto). 

If there’s one low-hanging fruit criticism of 2003’s Freaky Friday, it’s that it unsurprisingly feels formulaic at times. It’s hard to take a fresh look at a movie that’s been done twice before (and based on a book). And though the mixed family element was a new lens back then, much of it still felt plug and play. Freakier Friday is not that. I’m largely sick of sequels and reboots, but if they make more of them in the vein of this movie, I will gladly see them.

Also, (spoiler warning here) Chad Michael Murray’s character still has a crush on Jamie Lee Curtis’s character, and it’s just as uncomfortable, in the best way possible, as it was in 2003. 

Okay, I wrote this on the notes app of my phone and I’m about to copy/paste, so if you hate this review and it’s multi-clause sentences because I am RUSHING, then go read Variety. Bye!!