Recently, the classic film Freaky Friday announced that there will be a sequel coming in 2025, which begs the question: how well the original film hold up to today’s standards?

The film stars Jamie Lee Curtis as Tess Coleman, who is about to start her second marriage. creates tension between Tess and her daughter, Anna, is played by Lindsay Lohan. This conflict reaches its new height when Anna’s band needs to perform at the same time that Tess is having her rehearsal wedding, which leads to the two getting into an argument. During this confrontation, the restaurant’s owner sees this, and because it’s a 2000’s Disney movie, she decides to cast a spell on them. She achieves this by giving them both a fortune cookie that contains a message, that, when both of them read it, they swap minds and bodies. Consequently, now the main characters have to figure out how to live each other’s lives without destroying them. 

I immediately liked how the film jumps straight into the story without having a long introduction for all of the characters. The film knows that you’re not watching it for its story, and knows that you really just want to see how these characters react to situations they are not familiar with. This really helps the film from unnecessarily dragging the information that the audience doesn’t really need.

This film also holds a very underrated performance from Jamie Lee Curtis. Obviously, this film won’t be the main work she is remembered for, as she recently has won not only an Oscar, but an Emmy award as well. Despite not finding recognition in this role, she performed it well. Along with all those positives, the writing is particularly good for a Disney channel movie, and I found myself laughing at most of the jokes over the course of the runtime.

The film is loosely based on the 1976 film  which was also called Freaky Friday where Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster instead switch roles for a day.  The film was directed by Mike Waters, who has had one of the stranger career trajectories in the industry. His directing career started off with this film, then Mean Girls, which were both critically acclaimed, but after those two initial hits, his films seemingly slowly dropped in quality as his filmography grew. He was also a producer on 500 Days of Summer, which was released a few years after this film was released. 

Overall, Freaky Friday is a very enjoyable film to watch with your family. It doesn’t have an extended run time, so I would recommend giving it a watch and would therefore give it a 3 out 5.