Freakier Friday

Directed by Nisha Ganatra, Freakier Friday follows Jamie Lee Curtis’ Tess and Lindsay Lohan’s Anna as they once again find themselves caught up in body-switching shenanigans. There’s little doubt that Freakier Friday strikes virtually all of the wrong notes right from the get-go, as filmmaker Ganatra, armed with Jordan Weiss’ screenplay, delivers a relentlessly (and gratingly) slick endeavor that contains little of its predecessor’s easygoing charm – with the arms-length atmosphere perpetuated by a recurring emphasis on loud, over-the-top bits of comedy and silliness. And while Curtis and Lohan are relatively good here, as are agreeable periphery players like Manny Jacinto, Mark Harmon, and Chad Michael Murray, Freakier Friday‘s pervasively lackluster vibe is compounded by a seriously wrongheaded decision to throw two more characters into the body-switching mix – with the aggressively bland bent of these figures ensuring that it’s often surprisingly difficult to determine who’s trapped in whose body. By the time the padded-out (and far-from-satisfying) climax rolls around, Freakier Friday has definitively squandered the good will established by the 2003 original and cemented its place as a thoroughly objectionable sequel.

* out of ****