Freakier Friday (PG, 111 mins)
Verdict: Clunky body-swap comedy
Rating: 
Almost half a century has passed since the original Freaky Friday, adapted by Mary Rodgers from her own 1972 novel. She was the daughter of Richard Rodgers, co-writer with Oscar Hammerstein of The Sound Of Music, The King And I, South Pacific and Oklahoma!
What a brilliant family. We still love her father’s musicals and her mischievous body-swap premise still has legs… in Freakier Friday, no fewer than eight of them.
The bodies swapped in both the 1976 film and the hit 2003 remake with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan were those of a quarrelling mother and daughter, each of whom benefited from seeing the world from the other’s perspective. Emotional growth, I think they call it.
In Freakier Friday, a sequel to the 2003 film again starring Lohan and Curtis, the phenomenon befalls not just one pair of females but two.
And yet, instead of being twice as good it’s only half as good. There’s a lesson there somewhere.
Anna (Lohan) is now the single mum of a surf-crazy teenager, Harper (Julia Butters). Her own mother, Tess (Curtis), helps out however she can.
But their sunny Californian existence is rocked when a new love interest enters Anna’s life: an affable restaurateur called Eric (Manny Jacinto), who, following his wife’s death, has moved from England with his daughter Lily (Sophia Hammons).
Unhelpfully for them but crucially for the clunky plot, Lily and Harper go to the same high school and are sworn enemies. ‘She thinks she’s so much better than everyone because she’s British,’ complains Harper, pronouncing it ‘Briddish’ but savaging Lily’s ‘obnoxious’ accent.
She has a point. Lily is as supercilious as only a Brit given lines by a Hollywood screenwriter can be.
Moreover, young Hammons, though pretty as a picture, somehow keeps forgetting to act.
Maybe we should blame Jordan Weiss’s ropy script, or the effort (for a Californian) of straining
for those Knightsbridge vowels. Anyway, the enmity between the two girls reaches fever-pitch when, in double-quick time, Anna and Eric get engaged.
In a horrifying development for Harper, their plan is to move to London ‘where an avocado costs $11’. Lily is similarly appalled by the prospect of moving back home with a step-sister she loathes. But in the nick of time, magical realism strikes.
In the 2003 movie it was a wily Chinese woman with fortune cookies who masterminded the body-swap, but some critics got shirty about ‘cultural stereotyping’, so this time it falls to a chaotic all-American psychic (amusingly played by Vanessa Bayer).
The upshot is that Harper moves into her mother’s body, while Lily swaps places with Harper’s grandma Tess (and, of course, vice versa). Which is all very confusing, but at least gives Curtis a chance to parade her commendable lack of vanity by staring into a mirror and wailing about her lined face and ‘non-existent’ lips.
There is some passable comedy in all this, as Harper and Lily in their new guises at first continue trying to undermine their parents’ relationship, and in fairness there were smatterings of merry laughter at the screening I went to earlier this week.
But on the whole, Nisha Ganatra’s Freakier Friday made me want to swap bodies with someone who wasn’t there.
Weapons is actually a whole lot freakier, a really top-notch psychological thriller that develops into full-on and decidedly gory supernatural horror. It is properly gripping throughout.
The writer-director is Zach Cregger, whose debut solo feature was the electrifyingly tense Barbarian (2022). This is a terrific follow-up, a fascinating portrait of a small American town traumatised by a terrible episode: in the dead of night, at precisely 2.17am, 17 children from a single elementary-school class get out of their beds and run away from home, all disappearing without trace.
Many of the aghast parents and townsfolk suspect the children’s teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), of knowing more than she is letting on.
Miss Gandy in turn thinks the mystery must have something to do with Alex, the one child in the class who didn’t vanish (a super performance by nine-year-old Cary Christopher).
Very adroitly, Cregger tells the entire creepy story in six chapters, examining many of the same events from the perspectives of half a dozen key characters.
Among them is the father of one missing kid, played by Josh Brolin. At first he too is suspicious of Miss Gandy, but, dissatisfied with the police’s progress, he investigates on his own, leading him down an altogether different path.
There are deliberate hints, not least in the title, of Weapons being a kind of metaphor for all those school shootings that so scar modern-day America. But that’s not what has happened to these children, so what has?
You’ll find no clues here, but I can tell you there are some whopping jump-scares, and a wildly overwrought ending that’s tempered by some nicely judged humour. It’s an ingeniously crafted tale, exceedingly well told.
Both films are in cinemas now.
