Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan get their freak on in Freaky Friday, as a mother and daughter forced to walk a day in each other's shoes. It's a conventional but pleasantly cosy remake of the 1976 Jodie Foster body-swap comedy. And in the oldest tradition of Disney moviemaking, you can be sure of a few life lessons thrown in between the laughs.
Lohan gives it large as 15-year-old tomboy rock-chick Anna, a little rough around the edges and with a tongue to match. Her hormonal outbursts frequently bring her into head-on collision with strait-laced mom Dr Tess Coleman (Jamie Lee Curtis), a psychiatrist who uses every psychoanalytic trick to bring her teen into line.
"SURPRISING AMOUNT OF FUN"
But it takes a couple of magical Chinese fortune cookies for the pair to start seeing the world through each other's eyes - literally. The morning after, they awake trapped in each other's bodies, with Anna left to handle her mother's psychiatric patients and, like, grown-up stuff. Meanwhile, Tess must cope with the rigours of school life, and the amorous attentions of Anna's biker-boy crush, Jake (Chad Michael Murray) - not the sort she wants her daughter associating with.
You know which way this is all headed, but there's a surprising amount of fun to be had watching Jamie Lee Curtis drag her heels, rock out with an electric guitar, and spout too-cool teen-speak. Likewise, young Lohan is wonderfully wry, absent-mindedly hiking up her friend's hipsters to cover that bare midriff, and matter-of-factly telling her peers: "I don't believe in any contact with the opposite sex. At all."
Freaky Friday is sprightly, family-friendly fare which just about manages to keep its head above the concluding gush of syrupy sentiment. It lacks any real inventiveness, but tickles the funny bone often enough to keep mother and daughter in happy harmony for at least an hour-and-a-half.
Freaky Friday (2003)
