Freakier Friday is a legacy sequel, so to speak, that takes place twenty-two years after the original body swap in the first film with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan, a film that, quite to my surprise, I was honestly a big fan of. Anna Coleman (Lohan) is now a working music producer and also a single mother of her teenage daughter, named Harper. When Harper gets school detention with the new, annoying girl at her school, Lily, both Harper and Lily’s dad, Eric, meet, fall in love, and six months later, get engaged. Eventually, Anna and her mom, Tess, as well as Harper and Lily, encounter a supposed psychic, and all four of them change bodies. Harper and Anna swap, and Lily and Tess swap.

This sequel didn’t work at all for me. I think it’s one of the best examples that bigger doesn’t always mean better, with now four different people swapping bodies instead of two. It just becomes less interesting with four different characters because the movie is essentially juggling two different storylines at once, making it harder to attach to either one of them. It also becomes a bit convoluted because of that as well.

One thing that definitely didn’t help with that was that literally all of the new characters, with the exception of Anna’s new love interest-turned fiancé, were pretty obnoxious and uninteresting. I didn’t care at all about the two teenagers, because all they did for the vast majority of the film was pick on each other and do obnoxious “movie teenager stuff” that teenagers don’t actually do in real life. There was hardly anything to like about them, and without the ending that pretty much just relied on nostalgia for you to change your opinion on them, they didn’t work at all.

What also didn’t work at all was the actual plot of the film. It’s difficult enough when your two new main leads are both obnoxious, but when their actual “evil scheme” is as nonsensical as it is, and, again, something teenagers wouldn’t do, it becomes even worse. Essentially, their whole mission is to keep Anna and Eric from marrying each other so that they don’t have to deal with each other. With the whole body swapping thing, they use this to their advantage and do everything they can to keep the marriage from happening, but also find some of the weirdest ways to do so, none of which I will really mention because they heavily rely on nostalgia, essentially making them a bit of a spoiler.

Also, Anna and Tess barely have anything to do in this movie as the two teenagers. They hardly do anything meaningful for the actual story and story progression itself, at least not until the very end. Instead, most of their time is spent in detention and eating junk food because, you know, metabolism and stuff. You could honestly make it to where neither of them was part of the whole body swapping, and the story would be mostly the same. I think a version of this movie where just the two teenagers swap bodies, almost like a “curse on the family” sort of thing, would be a lot more interesting, and the way they could incorporate Anna and Tess would be by having them sort of guide them through their struggles since they’ve gone through it before. I don’t know, though, I’m not a Hollywood writer (and maybe that’s a terrible idea).

When it comes to the third act, there is a section that, yes, heavily relies on nostalgia, but it works and is the one positive I have for the movie, but I’ll get to that last. Everything else in the third act is pretty bad, on the other hand. The eventual conflict with Anna and Eric’s relationship feels really forced and unearned, and kind of comes out of nowhere, to be honest, even though you know it’s eventually going to happen for movie reasons. I wasn’t actually emotionally invested enough to really care about their relationship, so the eventual “falling apart” wasn’t interesting to me.

Now, finally, for my one positive with Freakier Friday, it does end on somewhat of a high note. It has a sweet ending that definitely completely relies on nostalgia, as I already said, but still works. However, the rest of the movie was anything but, and the film overall felt like a cheap nostalgia-bait that probably should have just gone straight to Disney+, and that’s really saying something coming from me, a person who is one of the biggest movie theater advocates out there.