Freakier Friday (2025)

Twenty-two years have passed since the Coleman women last traded bodies, and the franchise has responded the way franchises do, by doubling the inventory. Where the 2003 film swapped two, this one swaps four, pairing Anna with her daughter Harper and Tess with her soon-to-be stepgranddaughter Lily. The mechanics are handled with more care than the premise deserves, and the actors navigate eight overlapping characterizations with the discipline of people who know exactly what the audience came for. The result is warm, efficient, and content to be a family comedy.

The cultural housekeeping here is real, if measured. Director Nisha Ganatra has spoken plainly about the 2003 film's treatment of its Asian characters, calling the old stereotypes hurtful, and the sequel brings back Rosalind Chao and Lucille Soong while pointedly keeping them out of the body-swapping business. That is a correction made with a light touch, visible mostly to those who remember the original. The narrative itself belongs to women: Anna's abandoned music career, Tess's late-career book, Lily's grief for her mother. The body-swap conceit permits a temporary tour of unfamiliar physical forms, though it never pauses to make a lesson of it, and the film's interest in bodies remains strictly comedic.

What the film declines to do is just as notable. There is no sermon on climate, no indictment of capital, no queer subplot, no neurodivergent arc, no rewriting of the historical record. Conflicts are resolved by a duet and a wedding, which is either a failure of ambition or a sign of good manners. The film wants to sell us a Chevrolet Camaro, a Chappell Roan needle drop, and the durable chemistry of its two leads, and it does so without once stopping the music to lecture. We have classified it accordingly.