You’d be forgiven if your moviegoing interest in the legacyquel — a clever term for a next-gen sequel to a popular, typically very nostalgic film that former IndieWire editor Matt Singer coined over a decade ago — has waned. Again, Singer spotlighted the phenomenon over a decade ago, and franchise-mad Hollywood shows no signs of breaking with the pattern. “Tron: Ares” is fast approaching, and, just last week, Netflix launched “Happy Gilmore 2.” In the past year alone, we’ve had “Karate Kid: Legends,” “Gladiator II,” and “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” Mileage on these titles very much varies, as does critical response and audience enjoyment.
Related Stories
Leave it to Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan to crack the code as to what makes a good legacyquel, which they’ve done quite handily with their long-gestating “Freaky Friday” sequel, Nisha Ganatra’s charming and quite fun “Freakier Friday.” The secret? Fittingly enough, it harkens back to exactly what Curtis and Lohan brought to Mark Waters’ 2003 “Freaky Friday”: actual verve, obvious joy, and performances that are about three times better than they need to be.
If you’re of the mind that Curtis should have won her first Oscar for her work in Waters’ film, thanks to a spectacular and incredibly funny turn as overworked mom Tess Coleman, who switches bodies with her wise-ass teenage daughter (Lohan), leading to all kinds of high jinks, “Freakier Friday” is very much for you. Twenty-two years ago, Curtis turned in some of her best work as a sassy rocker teenager trapped in the body of her strait-laced mom, and revisiting that concept is more than enough reason to launch a sequel. The twist? Lohan ably matches Curtis’ vim and vigor, and a pair of young stars give them a serious run for their money as their body-switching compatriots.
Simply put: Here is a legacyquel worth the wait. What a concept!
Written by Jordan Weiss (who shares story-by credit with Elyse Hollander), the sequel makes an early claim to something sort of tricky: Yes, it’s going to love its various characters and their very different generational markers, but it’s sure as heck gonna poke some fun at them, too.
More than two decades on from the first film, we find Tess (Curtis) still working as a therapist, now armed with a podcast she’s attempting to launch, despite her Boomer tendencies to not actually record the damn thing. Anna (Lohan) is a single mom with a hip career as a music manager, but she’s also prone to attempting woo-woo deep-breathing techniques to ease her stress. And Anna’s teenage daughter Harper (Julia Butters)? She’s got a “no triggering” sign on her bedroom and attends a high school where “gluten-free” is the default offering for any and all foodstuffs.
Still, the Coleman ladies really love each other, and as Tess tells us in voiceover, when Anna decided to become a single mom all those years ago, she vowed they’d raise Harper together. Intergenerational parenting! Thank God that Tess and Anna are armed with some deep, hard-fought empathy for each other (thanks, everything that happened in “Freaky Friday”), but that doesn’t inure them from tough stuff to come. Surely, it’s nothing a little double body-switching can’t cure?
The fourth member of this ill-fated quad soon comes into focus: British transfer student Lily (Sophia Hammons), who cannot stand laidback surf bum Harper (the feeling is mutual). When the girls’ deep dislike for each other explodes into chem lab violence, their single (very, very much single) parents are forced into a parent-teacher meeting for the ages. The sparks are instant for Anna and Lily’s dad Eric (Manny Jacinto), and a zippy montage races us through their speedy romance, straight into an autumn wedding that, like many things in Ganatra’s film, sweetly echoes the original.
But the days leading up to the nuptials aren’t all flowers and puppies, and when all four ladies are forced to mix and mingle at Anna’s bachelorette party… well, you can probably see the swapping to come, or at least the need for the swapping to come. This time around, it comes courtesy of an absolutely hilarious Vanessa Bayer as a multi-hyphenate psychic who can’t seem to nail any of her many jobs (Reiki to Starbucks, business card-making to something involving dogs?), but has somehow harnessed the power to swap the bodies and souls of four women. (The film is entertaining enough to paper over some small plot holes, but audiences should be prepared to walk out of the theater happy and a bit confused over the finer points of what the heck just happened.)
Soon enough, Anna and Harper have switched (Butters nails the uptight-adult-in-kid-body ask, while Lohan gets to dabble in the teenage fun she wasn’t able to in the first film), along with Lily and Tess (if this was all a bid to get Curtis back to playing nutso teens in her adult body, the full force of her performance makes that reasoning hard to argue with). While Anna and Tess naturally team up to try to reverse things — and how fun for everyone else to see “Harper and Lily” hanging out — Harper and Lily come up with a different idea: They’ll use this as an opportunity to break up their parents finally.
Consider it a reverse “Parent Trap,” and Curtis and Lohan go wild with the possibilities, the two actresses clearly delighting in getting to go on this new adventure together (if the first film was missing anything, it was the fizzy fun of seeing the pair sharing the screen). And while much of what they take on is, well, kind of silly — consider a long-form montage sequence in which the duo try on wacky outfits with Anna’s rising star client Ella (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) — the obvious joy with which that stuff is approached is contagious.
It seems like the easiest ask — let’s make this “Freaky Friday” sequel as entertaining and funny as the first one! — but just look at a decade-plus worth of dour, dim, and dismal fellow legacyquels, and it’s clear how rare “Freakier Friday” really is. While many of the beats might feel familiar, there’s something cozy about those story points (that the film is centered on a wedding, just like the original, mostly feels right), and even some early tonal issues are forgotten as the film ratchets up its enthusiasm and good humor.
Curtis and Lohan’s commitment naturally extends to some bouts of dizzying physical comedy, some of the best examples taking place at (gasp!) at a record store belonging to no less than Jake (returning co-star Chad Michael Murray), who romanced both Coleman ladies in the first film. As Lohan attempts to flirt in such a way that it makes her look like she’s having a medical emergency, and Curtis finds herself crawling and joint-cracking around nearly every inch of the joint’s floor, another sort of spell takes hold — this time, on the audience. The best you can do? Embrace it. Something like this might only come around once every 22 years.
Grade: B+
Walt Disney Pictures will release “Freakier Friday” in theaters on Friday, August 8.
Want to stay up to date on IndieWire’s film reviews and critical thoughts? Subscribe here to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers.
