Review: 'Freakier Friday' is more frenetic than the 2003 original, but not as fun or as warm-hearted

There’s a frenetic sense of desperation that undercuts the comedy and camaraderie of the squeaky-clean teen comedy “Freakier Friday,” as if everyone involved is so determined to nail every joke that they squash too many of them.

The movie is the sequel to the 2003 Disney comedy “Freaky Friday,” in which a rock-guitarist teen, Anna (Lindsay Lohan), and her mom, Tess (Jamie Lee Curtis), fall under an old Chinese curse and swap bodies — forcing Anna to do adult stuff while Tess navigates her teen years all over again. It’s 22 years later, and the loving bickering hasn’t stopped.

These days, Tess is a therapist with a podcast and a devoted second husband, Ryan (Mark Harmon, also back from the original) — while Anna has channeled her rock ’n’ roll dreams into managing other musicians, namely a high-maintenance pop star, Ella (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), who’s having a very public breakup. Anna also is a single mom with a surf-loving 15-year-old daughter, Harper (Julia Butters).

Topping it all off, Anna is engaged to marry Eric (Manny Jacinto), a chef and restaurant owner. Their meet-cute came when Harper and Eric’s daughter, Lily (Sophia Hammons), got into a fight at school a year earlier. Now, the high schoolers who hate each other are about to become step-sisters — and, after the wedding, leave Los Angeles to live in Eric and Lily’s old hometown, London.

At Anna’s family-friendly bachelorette party (it’s a Disney movie, after all), Anna and Tess have an encounter with a loopy psychic (Vanessa Bayer), who reads their palms and realizes “you’ve walked in each other’s path” — and that they may need to remember the lessons from their switcheroo 22 years ago. The same psychic also delivers a fortune to Harper and Lily: “Change the hearts you know are wrong to reach the place where you belong.”

The next morning, with the wedding only a couple days away, everyone wakes up as somebody else. Anna and Harper have swapped bodies, and so have Tess and Lily. And then the freakiness really gets started — or, at least, that’s the attempt made by director Nisha Ganatra (“The High Note,” “Late Night”) and screenwriter Jordan Weiss.

The plot sets Anna and Tess in their younger bodies on a course to find the psychic and undo the curse, while Harper and Lily — in the forms of Lohan and Curtis — decide to call a truce with the purpose of breaking up Anna and Eric before the wedding. They also try to fake being adults, in a series of vignettes that aren’t as funny as they should be.

Ganatra apparently knows there’s less genuine comedy here, because of the film’s efforts to pump up the volume with comic cameos from such comedians as Chloe FIneman, June Diane Raphael, Sherry Cola, George Wallace and Elaine Hendrix (for those who needed a “Parent Trap” reunion tosses in for good measure). There’s also Chad Michael Murray showing up as Jake, Lohan’s teen crush from the first movie, creating a nostalgic aura without coming anywhere near funny.

That’s the problem all over “Freakier Friday”: People who should be funny and charming are given little space for either. It’s good to see Curtis and Lohan reconnecting, this time as adults navigating motherhood and grandmotherhood, but the movie leaves them stranded without enough that’s authentically amusing or emotional.

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‘Freakier Friday’

★★

Opens Friday, August 8, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for thematic elements, rude humor, language and some suggestive references. Running time: 111 minutes.