Film reviews: Freakier Friday | The Kingdom
This follow-up to body-swap comedy Freaky Friday has its moments, but it’s short on laughs relies too heavily on call-backs to the original film, writes Alistair Harkness
Freakier Friday (PG) ★★☆☆☆
The Kingdom (15) ★★★★☆
Another week, another legacy sequel. This time it’s Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan trotting out a belated follow-up to their 2003 body swapping box-office hit Freaky Friday, itself a remake of the third most famous Jodie Foster film of 1976 (after Taxi Driver and Bugsy Malone). In the Lohan/Curtis version, Lohan played angsty teen to Curtis’s overly critical psychoanalyst mother, with the body swap shenanigans helping resolve the former’s resistance to her mother’s impending nuptials and the latter’s despair at her daughter’s pop star ambitions and mild teen rebellion.
Freakier Friday picks up the story in real time, with Lohan’s Anna now a single mother with a teenage daughter of her own (played by Julia Butters, who went toe-to-toe with Leonardo Di Caprio as the precocious child actor in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood), and Curtis’s Tess on hand with all manner of passive-aggressive parenting advice. The body swapping twist comes when Anna falls for the British father of her daughter Harper’s school nemesis, Lily, a newly arrived English rose whose elitist personality rubs this dungaree-wearing surfer-girl up the wrong way (Sophia Hammons plays Lily; Manny Jacinto — from Netflix show The Good Place — plays her dad). With neither daughter of this soon-to-be-blended family happy about what their parents’ marriage will mean for their futures, some spiritual jiggery-pokery from a psychic on the weekend of the wedding results in Harper and her mum switching bodies and Lily trading hers, not with her dad (that would be too problematic for a Disney film), but with Harper’s grandmother Tess.
READ MORE: The Naked Gun review: Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson get the daftness needed to make reboot work
The latter perhaps justifies the “Freakier” part of the title, but doesn’t make a lot of sense beyond providing a way to centre Curtis as its star. That also means Curtis gets most of the best scenes, with Lohan relegated to straight woman, thanklessly sandwiched between Curtis’s Lily-as-Tess freaking out about suddenly having “crevices” in her face and peeing at inopportune moments and the Gen-Z Butters and Hammons (inhabiting the newly liberated spirit of their elders) cramming junk-food into their faces like they’re in a kid-friendly remake of The Substance.
There are a couple of funny lines (Facebook is described as a datastore for old people) and Curtis in comedy mode is always good value. But a lot of the humour is very bitty, dependent on pratfalls, groaning intergenerational misunderstandings, and comedians in small roles throwing jokes at a wall to see which ones will stick (very few of them do). It also relies on a lot of call-backs to that dim-and-distant first film, yet lacks the elegant simplicity of that film’s plot. The result is an overly busy film that’s short on actual laughs and a lot less fun to watch than the cast — per the end-credits blooper reel — clearly had making it.
From The Godfather to The Sopranos, the domestic realities behind organised crime are a staple of movies and TV shows about the mob, so all credit to slow-burning Corsican crime film The Kingdom for finding an intriguing new way to explore the skewed work-life balance of this heightened dynamic. Rather than zeroing in on the patriarchal head of a crime syndicate, writer/director Julien Colonna focuses instead on said gangster’s teenage daughter, making a film that combines the dreaminess of a coming-of-age movie with the hard-hitting violence of a gangster film — like The Godfather if it had been directed by Sofia Coppola rather than Francis.
Set in 1995, it revolves around 15-year-old schoolgirl Lesia (newcomer Ghjuvanna Benedetti), who’s not at all happy when the languorous summer holidays she plans to spend flirting with local boys in the Corsican seaside village she resides in with her aunt is rudely interrupted by her estranged father, Pierre-Paul (Saveriu Santucci), summoning her to stay with him in a secluded villa with only a bunch of middle-aged, out-of-shape henchmen for company. Though it’s not clear at first how much Lesia knows about the family business (the film is good at depicting the veil of ignorance that all kids have about their parents’ actual lives), as news reports filter in about a series of assassinations in which Pierre-Paul might have been the intended target, the hushed conversations she witnesses between her father and his men help her put two-and-two together and their planned bonding time soon evolves into a father-daughter road trip to escape the police and, more importantly, the rivals circling Pierre-Paul’s cloistered kingdom.
Of course, the opening shot of Lesia never leaves us in any doubt about where this is all going (it involves her being bloodied in a hunting ritual). Nevertheless, the film’s patience in letting us experience this world through her eyes makes the violence much more forceful when it does come. Benedetti, meanwhile, is superb — her face a quiet study in innocence corrupted as her father’s regretful choices seep into her by osmosis, hardening her to a life she’s fated to follow.
Both films are in cinemas from 8 August
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.