A body-swap comedy, when it’s really cooking, is built on a device that won’t quit. An actor, generally an adult, pretends to be inhabited by someone totally different from him or herself (generally a kid). The comedy that emerges is trip-wired with slapstick psychology — you feel like you’re looking at an actor but can just about see the person hidden inside. In “Big,” the “Citizen Kane” of the genre, Tom Hanks didn’t just mimic the gestures and wide-eyed aura of an eager 13-year-old; he seemed to be entering the kid’s soul, a feat of acting at once hilarious and enchanting. Jennifer Garner did much the same thing in “13 Going on 30” (one of the most inspired comedies of the 2000s), and so, in a less elevated way, did Jamie Lee Curtis in the 2003 remake of “Freaky Friday” — as did Lindsay Lohan, who in her witty fashion played someone channeling an older character (her mom!) with a kind of perfect stodgy aplomb.
“Freakier Friday” doubles the body swaps — and, in theory, the comedy complications. Lohan’s Anna is now a single mother with a teenage daughter, Harper (Julia Butters, that breakout girl from “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”). At Harper’s high school, Anna meets Eric (Manny Jacinto), a sexy widower from London with a daughter of his own: Lily (Sophia Hammons), who’s a mean-girl fashionista. She and Harper are not exactly fast friends. But when Anna and Eric get engaged, the two girls are suddenly faced with the prospect of becoming stepsisters.
This looks like it could shape up into a family from hell. That’s why the only thing that can save it is a double-tiered body swap, which the film’s director, Nisha Ganatra (“Late Night”), engineers without much pretense of fantasy explanation (it all hinges on a daffy psychic, played by Vanessa Bayer, hidden behind a soda machine). As soon as the magic happens, Anna and Harper have switched places: a mother-daughter swap that directly echoes the one in the first film. But upping the ante is a second swap: Lily, the mean girl, lands in the body of Jamie Lee Curtis’s Tess, who is Harper’s grandma (but practically her second parent), while Tess is taken over by the abrasive Brit-snob spitfire Lily.
The stage is set for an even wilder comedy than “Freaky Friday.” Yet somehow it doesn’t quite happen that way. What we’re longing to see is that inside-out performative magic, the irrepressible primal comedy of an actor playing a character who’s literally channeling someone else. We want to feel that body-swap tension. But in “Freakier Friday” this plays out in a weirdly limited way, and for a confluence of reasons.
It’s no insult to Lindsay Lohan to say that she has retained a girlish aura; that’s part of her millennial appeal. Whereas Julia Butters, who plays her daughter, acts with the wise-beyond-her-years precociousness of a Zoomer who’s got everything figured out (at least in her head). The result is that these two, as personalities, aren’t that far apart. So when they turn into each other, there’s actually very little comic frisson.
A different problem bedevils the second swap. Lily, as played by Sophia Hammons, has a distinctive snappish downbeat British-princess personality; some of it is her accent, some of it her entitled ‘tude. But that’s what we want to see transferred into Jamie Lee Curtis. And vice versa: Tess, with her spiky but cuddly grandmotherly aura, would be the perfect interior foil to Lily’s outward haughtiness.
Here’s what happens instead: Lily, even after the body swap, keeps speaking in her British accent (is the movie saying that accents are somehow part of a person’s physical make-up?); she seems like the same person she was before. If Curtis could have used that accent as part of her performance, it would have been much funnier, but instead she’s stuck playing Lily as a fount of generic bratty attitude, which merges with Tess’s own elderly brattiness. The bottom line is that none of these characters, after the swap, seem different enough from themselves to allow the comedy to detonate.
That said, the double swap lends “Freakier Friday” a juggling-balls-in-the-air quality that gives off a pleasant hum. It’s fun to ride the film’s complications; it follows through on its own logic just enough to create a watchably friendly Disney landscape. And there are a few scattered moments when the laughs break free: Lohan, as Harper, attempting to flirt with the man she thinks is her mother’s secret boyfriend or greeting Anna’s assistants with a cheerful “Hello, staff of people I see all the time!,” Curtis’s Lily shopping for old-age products in a drugstore.
The movie winds up being rather touching. It’s all about how Harper and Lily, in trying to break up their parents’ engagement, discover that they really do want to be sisters, and it’s about how Harper learns that her mom has been looking out for her in ways she had no idea of. Anna, the former leader of the rock band Pink Slip, is now the manager of Ella (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), a global pop star, but she’s been writing songs on the sly. And it takes Harper’s yearning energy to bring all of that to the surface. “Freakier Friday” scores as skewed Disney family fairy tale. It just doesn’t score as rollicking Rube Goldberg personality-transplant comedy.
