Freaky Friday film review

certificate_PG

FREAKY FRIDAY

This is the second remake of the 1976 family hit which has become something of a minor children's favourite over the years, perhaps due to the continuing appeal of its young star Jodie Foster. A 1995 TV movie saw Shelley Long in the role of the mother who swaps bodies with her petulant teenage daughter, and now it's Jamie Lee Curtis' turn to take over the reins. A sleeper success in the United States since its summer release, the modestly-budgeted film cost just $25m to make and has gone on to gross over $100m.

It seems that there will always be a market for a wholesome family film in which a younger girl battles with an older female figure and the success of Freaky Friday resembles the similar box office achievement of last year's Princess Diaries. Hollywood execs will no doubt be looking at this genre carefully and trying to put their own projects into development for the next holiday season.

The film couldn't be more of a contrast however to the recent mother/daughter feud pic Thirteen. There girls took drugs, had piercings, drank and had sex. There's none of that in Freaky Friday, where the turbulent teenager's mood swings and her hyper-organised mother's lives really reflect good wholesome American values: success through hard work, keeping a family unit together, and understanding each other's needs through regular communication.

Curtis plays the mother, a successful psychologist (yes, she has a collection of comedy value wacky patients), writer and widower about to remarry the perfect Mark Harmon. However, her daughter Annabell (Lindsey Lohan) gets Fs in English, never wants to get up for school and has only her pop band on her mind. Things come to a head when Annabell's band have a major audition on the night of Tess' wedding rehearsal, and a strange incident involving Chinese fortune cookies transplants both characters into each other's bodies.

Comic capers inevitably ensue, with the daughter unable to cope with her mother's hectic lifestyle and Curtis coming over all coy in the wake of the admiring glances she gets from her daughter's classmates. There's plenty of confusion and slapstick humour which both Curtis and Lohan jump into energetically, although Harmon - touted as a rising star back in the 80s when he made The Presidio - does suffer from having the most one-dimensional character to play.