Film: Freakier Friday
Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Lindsay Lohan, Julia Butters, Sophia Hammons, Manny Jacinto, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Rosalind Chao, Chad Michael Murray, Mark Harmon
Director: Nisha Ganatra
Rating: 2/5
Runtime: 111 min

The screen adaptation of Mary Rodgers’ 1972 kid-literature classic gets a revisit in Director Nisha Ganatra’s ‘Freakier Friday,’ a film that takes the legacy sequel to old heights by engaging with the same two leads as in Mark Waters’ 2003 remake of the 1976 ‘Freaky Friday.’ Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan go shrill and shrieky in their efforts to rekindle the body-swap magic in this sequel. Mark Waters’ 2003 remake was fairly enjoyable, had some memorable dialogue, the leads were younger and the film managed to score a surprise hit at the box-office. This film though,  has less of a chance of raising the bar at the BO.

The intergenerational sparring, a mother-daughter conflict, is partially about teenage rebellion. This time single mother ex grunge rocker turned music biz manager Anna (Lohan), whose wedding to widowed Brit restaurateur Eric (Manny Jacinto) looming after a whirlwind six-month courtship, becomes the brunt for malcontent.  It’s basically a role reversal given that in the previous film it was her control-freak psychotherapist mother Tess’s (Jamie Lee Curtis) intent to replace her late husband by marrying Ryan (Mark Harmon) that caused all the ruckus.

Tess goes ballistic and shriek-happy in order to put her point across and it feels like she is demented. The characters are 22 years older and would have found some middle ground - if not peace, by now but the script by Jordan Weiss prefers to reverse the earlier template rather than throw up an original conflict and this proves rather disastrous for the film.