Freakier Friday was terrible, but not uniquely terrible; it’s the same brain-mush that basically everyone pumps out today. It tries to do fan service while introducing some new elements (four mind changes, which are way too confusing to keep track of), kind of like the new Star Wars movies. New but different! But the plot points feel tired and worn and there was nothing new or alive in the film. One of it’s many sins was that it wasn’t funny - there was one scene I laughed at, which I’ll discuss, but let’s go through the elements quickly.

Regarding the cast, Lindsay Lohan (39 now, 37 or 38 filming) did not look good - she’s had a lot of plastic surgery, including bleaching out all her freckles like Michael Jackson bleaching his skin white. She looked 45. Jamie Lee Curtis is 66 now and looked 75. Lohan’s comedic timing was pretty bad and Curtis’s was a bit better. The two main introductions, Julia Butters and Sophia Hammons playing teenagers, were both very bad and had no comedic timing - Butters I totally thought was Emma Roberts, they looked the exact same, but she wasn’t.

One of the things that really bothered me about the film (and about most media today) is the symbolic manipulation it employs. By this I mean it pushes messages subliminally without articulating those messages consciously and verbally - it seemed like all of the supporting cast was black or brown, the whites were all elderly except for Chad Michael Murray (who appeared in the one funny scene in the film) who was grandfathered in due to his appearance in the first film, and Lohan’s love interest was Asian (to appeal to Chinese audiences, I guess). So the subliminal message was that this is all one big non-white world and whites are on their way toward extinction, basically. Men appear as basically appendages of the women in the film, where women act in mannish, active and masculine roles while the men are passive and weak, reactive - another subliminal message. Another message, which was pushed in the first film too but even more aggressively here, and this one very vocally, was children rebelling against their parents - this is just a gross message, and it was very vulgarly pushed. And the real message, the core of it, is how there is no spirituality or depth, just marketing, surface, we are all interconnected and replaceable widgets with different hair colors and little hobbies and such, but we are all more or less the same. That is the real flattening effect being offered.

The script felt churned out by AI more or less. The director, Nisha Ganatra, is both Indian and a lesbian, and served as producer on the transsexual television show Transparent. The message and the messenger are always intertwined. The screenplay was by Jordan Weiss, a Jewish guy.

I had to write this review out because I felt psychically dirty and violated after watching this shallow filth - to exorcise the demonic psychic impression it left on me. There’s a reason why I am careful about the content I expose myself to, whether it is political updates, cultural updates, or other media. Even if you reject its messaging it still rubs off and has an effect on you.

Hard pass.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5761904&forum_id=2,#49180750)