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Jamie Lee Curtis has had a great career resurgence in the last few years. It guess it started with the new Halloween, which turned out to be the first in a trilogy, and this is fitting as these films have been the backbone of her filmography since she started out in the 70s. Then she was cast in Knives Out of course, won a deserved Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once, got a recurring part in successful Hulu show The Bear and was praised for her wonderful appearance in The Last Showgirl. It’s not that she was ever out of the limelight but there was a period around the turn of the millennium when she was mostly appearing in less celebrated things like Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Christmas with the Kranks and, well, Freaky Friday.

There have been some misses among this run of hits, Haunted Mansion wasn’t great and Borderlands was terrible, but nonetheless this latest legacy sequel seems, on paper at least, like a bit of a drop back to lesser times. 

Okay, let’s not beat around the bush. On paper shmaper, Freakier Friday is absolutely a drop back to the same kind of cheesy, cliched, undemanding corn that Disney was producing in the early 2000s. It’s not terrible (I’ll come back to this) but it certainly isn’t part of Curtis’ glorious renaissance. She won’t be widely garlanded for this one.

It’s probably worth looking at a few of the other performers here too. You might think this is precisely the type of movie sixteen year old Julia Butters would beg to turn up in but she has previously worked with Tarantino and Spielberg and was excellent for both of them. Emmy nominated Mark Harmon is here too, following has an illustrious TV career, including a memorable appearance in The West Wing, and great parts in The Presido, Wyatt Earp and Natural Born Killers.

Then there is Manny Jacinto who has had a different professional journey. His performance as one of the leads in Netflix’s The Good Place was a real calling card which sure enough lead to a part in Top Gun: Maverick. However his part which was almost entirely cut out. Then he was hired to play a very significant role and the Star Wars show The Acolyte, which indeed he impressed in, only for the series to get canned after one season. Presumably he thought his luck had changed when he found he been cast alongside Jamie Lee Curtis, what with the profile and calibre of her recent projects. Oh well! The only person getting a lift from this is Lindsay Lohan who here makes a return to cinemas after languishing in straight to streaming romances and Christmas movies but it’s really not a step forward for her either. They should have given her a better role in the new Mean Girls.

Here’s the thing though. All of these actors are great in this. This is clearly another body swap movie and they aren’t actually that easy to pull off, as the risible Family Switch showed a year and a half ago. There is actually real skill in playing one character as another character and while the benchmark here might be Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle or Face/Off (in terms of performance at least, it’s Your Name or last year’s It’s What’s Inside in terms of story) they play this well. Curtis probably does best as a seventy something inside a teenager’s body finding that she can run and dance and fall over without breaking anything, and that when she is down her legs will actually lift her off the floor again (maybe that’s just the bit I identify with now). Lohan shows that she genuinely deserves to be in larger releases again too. She properly owns the screen.

If you’ve not seen the original film (the one with this cast from 2003, not the Jodie Foster version from 1976) and don’t have the nostalgia aspect then I’m not sure there is anything for you here. I kind of qualify for this as Freaky Friday was a favourite with my daughters who now both in their early twenties accompanied me to this. It really hasn’t moved on in terms of sophistication or style, it’s actually impressive as to how familiar it all feels this many years later. In fact I can’t think of any other legacy sequel that has developed things as little as this, even Happy Gilmore 2, but that is probably what was needed. It isn’t lazy or laboured though and everyone involved gives it their all. 

So I don’t think this will reflect badly on Jamie Lee Curtis, or anyone. With a filmography as packed as hers it was inevitable she’d been in another reboot and better this than You Again Again, A Fish Called Twoda, Retrading Places or Truer Lies.

Actually maybe that last one. If it distracted James Cameron from the other films he is making right now then that’s a swap I’d like to see. 

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