Each time its nostalgia. In 2003, Mark Waters, director of the black comedy The House of Yeswas mandated by Disney to dust A crazy, crazy, crazy FridayMary Rogers’ novel already adapted by the studio in the late 1970s with Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster. Their roles were taken up by Jamie Lee Curtis, 80s icon then losing speed, and the new teenage muse of the studio, Lindsay Lohan, revealed in To us four from Nancy Meyers. Twenty-two years later, this is the remake also became a cult object for millenials Aging, ex-spotty ex-ados now parents in turn. Hence this improbable suite, a few months after a not frankly happy musical rehabilitation of Lolita despite methe other teen movie Memorable from the Waters-Lohan duo. The result is less cynical than it could be feared, but less successful than we could hope for.
Freaky Friday 2 Symptomatize in fact two recurring problems of this type of nostalgic business. On the one hand, there is the model Jurassic Worldwho intends to replay the bravery pieces of the original film while expanding each time a little more the scale of the issues (more and more dinos). On the other, that of And Just Like That (the rest of Sex and the City) : It is a question of commenting on the cultural gap which separates the original work from contemporary sensitivities. In the first part, Tess (Curtis) and Anna (Lohan), a mother and daughter unable to communicate, magically exchanged their bodies and their lives from one day, and managed to understand the point of view and the sufferings of the other. Here, the device is not only resumed, but split: Harper, the daughter of Anna (Julia Butters) and Lily (Sophia Hammons), that of her future husband Eric (Manny Jacinto), exchange their bodies with Anna and Tess. The problem is that the film is not scriptwriting at the height of this narrative inflation. Of the five relations that the latter would suppose to explore (mother-grandmother, grandmother-girlfriend, mother-daughter, mother-Belle-daughter, sisters by alliance), only one seems really invested by the story: that of the two sisters-to-be fearing the marriage of their respective parents. That is to say that which the two stars of the original film take care of, which leave young actresses only crumbs.
The time that would be necessary to precisely unfold the relationships between the four protagonists is mainly used to revisit the route marked out by the previous film: basically, realize with horror that you exchanged your body with another, renew your wardrobe, allow yourself a junk food, make gring to Chad Michael Murray Scott brothers And play supermarket punk with your friends. Some elephantine parentheses are spared in this program to comment on the flaws of the present (some spikes launched to permissive parenting and the culture of benevolence), or to make its my guilt On the errors of the past (the Chinese “exotic” magician of the first film is opportunely replaced by a white manure and we learn by passing that her restorer daughter has become a successful business woman). Hence the feeling of a fairly wobbly film which seems to find only intermittently the mixture of burlesque comedy and discreet family melo which made the full success of its predecessor.
There remain a few small staging tips (especially in the sequences of body swap : The acrobatic crane movement of the first film is followed by a 360 ° vertical panoramic double panoramic) and fairly funny gags, especially those around Jamie Lee Curtis aging who, in line with his recent remarkable supports, cabotine thoroughly. Undoubtedly also the pleasure of finding (elsewhere than in a Netflix TV movie) the worried liveliness of Lindsay Lohan, whose convincing interpretations – at Robert Altman or Paul Schrader – were too often overshadowed by his personal life. And finally, obviously, this moving belief that underlies the franchise, according to which a family can cure everything as long as its members are able to put themselves-at least for a day-instead of each other.