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When I was a kid in the early 2000s, Lindsay Lohan was across the holy trinity of sleepover movies: Mean Girls, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen and Freaky Friday. Each is a sacred text, a rite of passage watched until you and your friends are all word perfect, songs and scenes ingrained into your memory well into adulthood.
Thankfully, Hollywood is hellbent on resurrecting as many existing IPs as it possibly can, meaning Disney is giving us girls now in their 30s a sequel to the 2003 body swap comedy Freakier Friday. In the original movie, a mum and daughter swapped bodies, which allowed them to realize how they’ve been unfair to the other (don’t worry, they got switched back in the end). Lindsay Lohan is now on the other side of rebuilding her post-child star life and ready to reunite with Jamie Lee Curtis, and the result is absolutely glorious.
Mild spoilers for Freakier Friday ahead.
Let’s start with the bad news: Lohan’s Anna and Jake (Chad Michael Murray) are no longer together in Freakier Friday, despite their will-they-won’t-they romance being the entire plot of the first movie. Anna has decided to go parenthood alone in Freakier Friday, raising now 15-year-old daughter Harper (Julia Butters) on her own. Tess (Curtis) is the psychologist-turned-podcaster we remember, intent on helicopter grandparenting as best as she can. Anna meets fellow parent Eric (Manny Jacinto) when Harper gets into trouble with his daughter Lily (Sophia Hammons), and the two fall in love. When Anna and Eric soon plan to get married, a (frankly terrible) mystic at her bachelorette party swaps spirits between the quartet, and it’s a race against time to fix it.
When I found out that the storyline beats were almost exactly the same as the original movie just with additional characters I didn’t want, and even when I saw the trailer, I was braced for the worst. However, nothing could have prepared me for the spring in my step immediately after watching the full movie, which is a lightness I haven’t felt through films for decades. Freakier Friday ticks all the boxes we’re desperate for it to (feel-good storytelling with a light-hearted touch, Lohan at her best, silly nods to girlhood) and that’s going to be a lot of happy young women who’ve been left unfilled by mainstream media.
Freakier Friday is far from perfect, but it is a millennial teenage dream
The best things in life are those that are perfectly imperfect, and in an industry that’s striving for AI greatness and motion-blended superhero glory, that’s refreshing. As a Disney movie, Freakier Friday is not trying to be anything else – it’s not trying to compete as a box office smash, and it’s not trying to get a new audience base. Instead, it’s a love letter to its fans from way back when, and in turn, for Lindsay Lohan, too.
For me, the best part of Freakier Friday is seeing a happy, healthy Lohan back where we want her and absolutely loving it. She thrives working with Curtis and Murray, and it’s almost as if no time has passed. Freaky Friday clearly created an environment she felt comfortable in, meaning she could give her whole heart to the sequel when the timing was biologically right (according to Curtis, Disney was approached when Lohan could viably have a teen daughter).
Lohan turns up to our premiere in a nod to the final outfit she wore in Freaky Friday, and the love in the room for what they have created is palpable. It shows in every one of her scenes, effortlessly finding the balance between legendary Disney icon and a comeback kid proving she never lost the acting chops she was once heralded for. Between them, Lohan and Curtis go full throttle back into the 2000s, with plenty of references to their original movie through a stylised narrative structure typically left behind in the noughties (think school food fights, comedic detention scenes and impromptu fashion shows).
If you’re a fellow child of the noughties, Freakier Friday has this wonderfully rare ability to suspend time, leaving the everyday stresses of 2025 life at bay. In this bubble, the biggest worry is seeing whether Pink Slip will play ‘Take Me Away’ (more on that later), and if Anna will make it to her wedding on time. There’s love, laughs, and plenty of Easter eggs, and it’s genuinely the closest we can come to travelling back in time.
New additions hold up just as well, for the most part
However, this doesn’t mean the new elements in Freakier Friday are left out in the cold. There’s a fresh take on modern social stereotypes that doesn’t feel as though someone’s mom has written it – instead the movie comes across as understanding what it means to be a young woman in the 2020s. Nobody is taking themselves or anything around them too seriously, meaning the movie has flexibility to lean into the unhinged storytelling that children’s TV was fixated with 20 years ago.
The only place this doesn’t entirely work is with popular singer Ella (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), who Anna now manages. She struggles to feel like a popstar that would genuinely appeal to the TikTok generation, shoehorned into the plot just so Anna has enough emotional background to make up for her split with Jake.
This brings me to my biggest gripe with the sequel – you cannot continue a well-known 2000s IP and not use Chad Michael Murray properly. He was the biggest onscreen heartthrob of a generation, and I was genuinely overcome with nostalgia by seeing him in the flesh just before watching the movie. I hope he’d still be with Anna (or at the very least be back together by the end), but he’s sparsely seen and is only used to prop up jokes coming from Tess. There’s no explanation for why they’re no longer together, and, without spoilers, there’s certainly a missed opportunity to extend his connection to the movie’s main dilemma.
But enough about Chad (I’ll just rewatch Sullivan’s Crossing for a Murray hit). What about Pink Slip? Yes, the iconic fictional band is back together, and yes, you’ll see the entire back catalog. I recommend watching with your best friend for the full emotional effect of belting the words as the band has their onscreen reunion, albeit you might be a bit thrown off by a jarring edit that goes against the original film’s soundtrack. Still, this is a small price to pay for a cinematic moment of dreams, and boy, seeing Christina Vidal back where she belongs is mine.
Frankly, I’m impressed with Freakier Friday. The minute a sequel comes out decades after the original, it’s set up for a losing streak, but Lohan and Curtis’ effortless embodiment of 2003 means the overall premise works despite the huge chunk of time in between. Cinema buffs will say it’s terrible, and they’re probably right. But Freakier Friday is a worthwhile sequel, and it’s definitely what I – and I imagine other noughties children – want.
