Freaky a classic among 2000s kids who yearned for a spicy teen movie but were only allowed to watch Disney Channel, is finally getting its much-longed-for sequel, Freakier Friday. The original movie granted sheltered millennials a cornucopia of gifts: some pop-punk bangers that gestured at rebellion, an enduring fascination with Jamie Lee Curtis, Chad Michael Murray on a motorcycle, our first brush with the White Stripes and the Hives, the word senescence, and inside-out shirts as peak fashion.
Whether the sequel can reach the heights of these cultural touchstones remains to be seen, but there’s one thing it will absolutely offer a new generation of viewers: a totally fresh set of ethical dilemmas. The original asked a question no other teen has ventured to answer: What should a teenager in the throes of angst do after switching bodies with her 50-something mom who’s about to get married to the human equivalent of a Men’s Wearhouse suit? Freaky Friday does not shy away from the depths and dangers of this conceit, sending daughter Anna Coleman (Lindsay Lohan) and mother Tess Coleman (Curtis) to the outer limits of empathy after they swap lives: Together and apart, they explore age-inappropriate romance, impersonate each other at work and school (with potentially dire consequences), and complicate their already fragile family dynamic.
Freakier Friday, true to its title, aims to compound these ethical quandaries by wrangling Anna’s daughter and future stepdaughter into the body-swapping mix. And its arrival gives us a very good reason to reminisce on and rank the moral messes of the first Lohan-Curtis joint, from least to most disturbing/illegal/just kinda fucked. Perhaps herein lies a valuable lesson for whenever you get body swapped with someone in your family: Maybe just take a sick day instead of taking over, and potentially ruining, the life of your loved one?
17. Breaking the Rules of the Wango Tango Battle of the Bands Audition
Frankly, I don’t care if Tess, in Anna’s body, broke the sacrosanct rules of the Wango Tango battle of the bands and guitar-synced her way to victory (or at least the next round of competition). Curtis’s guitar solo rips:
Luckily, unlike in Singin’ in the Rain, there’s no grand reveal of Anna and Tess’s subterfuge, and Anna’s band, Pink Slip, lives on to rock another day. (And they’re back to rocking in 2025!)
16. Ordering $10,000 Worth of Halibut
Fine, Tess does this before trading bodies with Anna, and sure, she’s using her own money to order halibut for her own wedding. But the insatiable maw of the wedding-industrial complex—and the people who’d shovel $10,000 worth of halibut into that maw—is its own ethical problem. The salmon option was so much cheaper! And I can almost guarantee that Tess’s wedding guests would like it better, because who’s really that into halibut? Perhaps Anna-as-Tess made the right ethical choice when she canceled on the caterer; even if it left her mom high and dry before the wedding, it also left Tess $10,000 richer.
15. Canceling Your Mom’s Root Canal
It turns out that Anna and Tess could get their own bodies back as soon as they did something selfless for each other. And if you were ever a teenager with a mom and/or a mother with a teenage daughter, you’ll probably understand why it took a while for that to happen. But Anna could have gotten her selfless act out of the way a lot earlier by just sitting through her mom’s root canal. (Why Tess had a root canal scheduled for the day before her wedding is anyone’s guess—maybe she really did want to get out of marrying her fiancé, Ryan.) Instead, Anna cancels the appointment the day of, probably also landing her mom with a late cancellation fee—not to mention a rotting tooth that she’ll have to deal with for her whole honeymoon.
14. Going on a Shopping Spree With Your Mom’s Platinum Amex
You know when you’re 11, and you buy a birthday gift for your parent, but you’re obviously using their money, so it just ends up being a gift that they paid for? That’s a generous interpretation of Anna-as-Tess’s Santa Monica shopping spree, when she revamps her mom’s drab wardrobe in a montage that rivals anything in Pretty Woman. Anna’s selfishness in buying designer clothes her mom wouldn’t even like notwithstanding, she does give us the movie’s most iconic look: Curtis’s (to die for) Diane von Furstenberg silk dress, heeled boots, Y2K-chic sunnies, and, of course, a diamond stud for that new cartilage piercing. Sure, you could say that Anna just wanted to inject some pizzazz into her mom’s wardrobe. But the shopping spree really just seems like a jab at her mom’s bland attire (and personality)—and maybe a way for Anna to get back at Tess for taking away her bedroom door and all her fun.
13. Getting Body Alterations Right Before the Wedding Day
This could be lumped in with the ethically dubious shopping spree above, but clothes are returnable—a brand-new hole in your ear isn’t. Anna’s yen for piercings verges on the compulsive: First, she got her own belly button pierced without her mom’s permission (and since that’s definitely illegal, she probably did it herself—a Lindsay Lohan signature). Now she’s getting her mom’s cartilage pierced, again without permission.
Anna also managed to squeeze in a haircut to show off her (mom’s) new piercing. Curtis’s Freaky Friday pixie is an icon in its own right, but any bride will tell you not to do anything drastic with your hair right before your big day. No wonder Ryan was getting worried that Tess had cold feet; there’s no greater sign of a midlife crisis than a pixie cut. (That and riding on the back of a motorcycle with Chad Michael Murray.)
12. Jeopardizing Your Daughter’s Friendships and Denying Her a Future as the Next Tom DeLonge
The big conflict at the center of Freaky Friday is whether Anna’s band will get to try out for KIIS-FM’s Wango Tango, the first step in any pop-punk group’s path to greatness. Pre-swap, Tess says that Anna can’t play in the audition—pretty understandably, since it’s at the same time as Tess’s rehearsal dinner. But eventually, we find out that the House of Blues, where the auditions are, is only half a block away from the rehearsal dinner. Because of a recent commercial about James Blunt, I know that Google existed in 2003, and Tess could have figured that out. It really makes you wonder: Does she want to ruin Anna’s life?
But it’s not just the audition Tess is seemingly trying to ruin: Almost as soon as she takes over Anna’s body, she’s slut-shaming Anna’s bandmates, telling them to pull down their crop tops, and bragging about her superior knowledge of Hamlet—basically, she starts acting like their mom, which is a bad way to keep your (daughter’s) friends around. She also leaves them in the dust to make up with Anna’s bully, Stacey Hinkhouse, whom she clearly thinks is better friend material just because she wears pastel cardigans.
11. Bullying Your Little Brother in the Guise of Your Mother
There’s nothing more infuriating than when your sibling acts like your mom—telling you what to do and patting you on your head like you’re a little baby. But what might be even worse for Anna’s little brother, Harry (Ryan Malgarini), is when the person he thinks is his mom starts acting like his sister—calling him a punk, trying to make him walk 20 blocks to school through a gauntlet of bullies, and telling his teacher that he should be held back because he’s such a shrimp. As an older sibling, I know how hard it can be to find a scrap of sympathy for your little brother or sister. But Anna could have pulled it together and not made Harry think that his mom had turned on him, leading to decades of relationship trauma, an anxious attachment style, and probably life as a single, broke loser. Hopefully Anna’s bullying didn’t make a lasting impression, but as we know, the kid’s not very tough.
10. Sabotaging the Future of Teenage Bully Stacey Hinkhouse
Tess-as-Anna spends part of her school day trying to repair the broken relationship between Anna and her childhood friend Stacey Hinkhouse (played by Julie Gonzalo, who had a good run playing bullies in Chad Michael Murray movies). Obviously, Tess should have known that this is a dynamic as old as time: In a teen movie, no middle school friendship lasts into high school. When Stacey makes it seem like Tess is cheating on a test, though, she finally sees Stacey’s true colors. Tess ends up taking a very Election-style form of revenge against erasing the answers Stacey put on the test and penciling in “I’m stupid!” instead. Grown therapist Tess probably should have taken the high road and not tried to sabotage a teenager’s future, however heinous that teenager might be. Especially because the only teen whose life might get ruined by this is Anna, whom multiple teachers witnessed making her way to the filing room to doctor the test.
9. Calling Your Daughter a “Little Harlot” and a “Stripper”
This one has nothing to do with Tess and Anna’s body swap—sometimes Tess just sucks as a mom, even when she’s in her own body!
8. Taking Your Daughter’s Big Test (and Then Cheating on It)
I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: The plot of this movie, and nearly every sticky ethical situation Tess and Anna find themselves in, would have been rendered null and void if they’d just taken a sick day. If Anna-as-Tess had just called the school, she probably could have gotten her mom out of taking this test. Instead, Tess teaches her daughter the wrong lesson about cheating and takes the test for her—not that it probably did Anna much good.
Perhaps a valuable lesson was learned, though: Parents should never underestimate the Byzantine complexity of high school math.
7. Shaming Your Body (That Your Daughter Is Now Inhabiting) and Not Letting Her Eat Some French Fries in Peace
The early 2000s were a different place (that doesn’t seem too different from 2025, come to think of it), and no one back in the day blinked an eye when Tess-as-Anna snatched a carton of McDonald’s fries out of her daughter’s (her own?) hands and told her they’d go straight to her thighs if she kept eating them. Toxic thoughts about your body are passed down from mother to daughter like a (not so precious) heirloom—and that’s even more true when your daughter is literally inside your body.
6. Cruising the Streets of L.A. Without a Driver’s License
Look, if Freaky Friday took place somewhere with less traffic, I wouldn’t have a problem with Anna driving without a license! She has a permit, even if she can’t find it anywhere, and she clearly knows the basic mechanics of driving. But watching her careen in and out of traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway fills me with dread. I may not have thought much of Anna’s hair-raising maneuvers when I watched Freaky Friday as a kid, but now I have driven in L.A.—and it’s the stuff of nightmares, even if you have your driver’s license. That Tess blithely sits beside her, going to town on those french fries while Anna nearly causes a 10-car pileup, is perhaps the least believable part of this movie.
5. Violating HIPAA
Again, I’m pretty sure therapists are allowed to take sick days! Instead, before setting her loose on her patients, Tess just tells Anna, “You are in no way to give anyone any advice. That would be unethical!”
But isn’t it also unethical to sit in on a therapy session without the patient’s consent? Or, you know, to pretend to be a therapist at all, even if you’re just listening to your patients’ (sometimes incomprehensible) complaints and asking, “How do you feel about that?”
Would you send a teenager into an operating room instead of a surgeon? Probably not! Anna should also not be trusted with the delicate feelings and confessions of Tess’s patients—some of whom will probably be looking for a new therapist after they catch Anna-as-Tess on TV.
4. Making Chad Michael Murray Fall in Love With You(r Mom)
Freaky Friday makes it clear that Anna has barely ever spoken to her crush, Jake—played by Chad Michael Murray in his teen heartthrob prime. So why did she choose this Friday of all Fridays, when she’s wearing her mom’s body, to go on a romantic date with him?! I guess it would be hard to resist bonding over early-2000s rock bands and “… Baby One More Time” with Chad Michael Murray in a global village coffeehouse and even harder to say no to taking a ride on the back of his Ducati. When you’re a teenager living in your mom’s body, everything just feels so urgent; if you don’t savor these moments with Chad Michael Murray right now, when will you ever get to? You might never get to ride his motorcycle again!
What Anna might not have anticipated is that her mom is a certified babe (and certainly not the crypt keeper). Chad Michael Murray falls for Anna’s soul and, apparently, her mom’s body. The power of bootleg Hives CDs compels him to follow Anna-as-Tess to her house, the rehearsal dinner, and House of Blues, and he rebuffs Tess-as-Anna’s attempts to distract him with a sneakily age-inappropriate kiss. Sure, he needs to learn the lesson that “no means no,” and you should probably leave an adult woman alone when she’s about to get married to someone else. But Anna could have done her part by waiting to flirt with Jake until she was back in her own age-appropriate, not-engaged-to-Ryan body.
3. Treating Chinese Characters With a Heavy Dose of Racism
It’s pretty clear that Anna and Tess weren’t the only ones facing some ethical dilemmas and making the wrong choices—the movie’s creators also made a hash of their treatment of the movie’s Chinese characters. Pei-Pei (Rosalind Chao) and her mom (who doesn’t get a name, and is played by Lucille Soong) run House Chiang, where Anna and Tess receive their fateful body-swapping fortune cookies. Both Pei-Pei and her mom come laden with a number of stereotypes about Chinese people: They have access to some kind of mystical power right out of Big Trouble in Little China, Tess calls their body-swapping powers “Asian voodoo,” they speak in broken English (or no English at all) and have broad accents, and have broad accents, and gongs go off when Anna and Tess leave their restaurant.
Pei-Pei and her mom both swoop in to save white people from the problems they’ve created for themselves (from catering snafus to familial conflicts), but they don’t get much of a story line of their own. Freakier Friday seems to have learned from the mistakes of the original and shifted the magic powers onto Vanessa Bayer, although Pei-Pei will also be making an appearance in the sequel—hopefully not soundtracked by a gong this time.
2. Almost Going Through With a Marriage to Your Mom’s Fiancé
At the rehearsal dinner, Tess finally realizes that she and Anna won’t be swapping back before her wedding and tells her daughter that they should postpone it. Finally, someone’s thinking straight! But then … Anna goes ahead and gives a speech that indicates she is very much planning on going through with the wedding anyway. Sure, it’s because Anna accepts Ryan and gives the wedding her blessing that she and Tess finally do switch back (and not a moment too soon). But did she stop to think about what would happen if she went through with the wedding?!
1. Giving Anna and Tess the Fortune Cookies in the First Place
The inciting incident of Freaky Friday has to top this list. Taking license with the fate and selfhood of two people you barely know is surely the greatest ethical gamble of a movie full of them. Pei-Pei’s mom is playing god in that Chinese restaurant, and maybe she should learn to fear what she’s created. So what if Pei-Pei’s mom was right and her magic did solve all of Tess and Anna’s problems? If she hadn’t been right and Anna and Tess couldn’t resolve their issues within 24 hours, what would have happened? Let’s see: Anna would have had to call off that wedding eventually, leaving her family broken once again. She probably would have driven her mom’s practice into the ground (although she could have had a second career as a TV personality); she also probably would have left her family in bankruptcy because of her shopping habits. Anna’s band would have dissolved without their lead guitarist, and you can forget all about the Wango Tango battle of the bands. Tess probably would have gotten kicked out of school, and she definitely would have lost all of her (daughter’s) friends. And who knows how Harry would have ended up after being parented by a sister who despises him?
Sure, Tess-as-Anna and Anna-as-Tess each bear some responsibility for the problems they caused after swapping bodies. But one could argue that a teen simply should have never inhabited her mom’s body, or vice versa, no matter how many lessons about the power of mother-daughter love they got out of it.
The existence of a Freakier Friday, though, implies that someone is still out there using their body-swapping powers for ill. Maybe Tess and Anna learned from the messes they made the first time around, but chances are the next generation will need to make the same mistakes before getting their bodies back. And so the cycle goes: a new Freaky Friday for every generation, to teach them the lessons their parents learned decades ago.
Helena Hunt
Helena Hunt is a copy editor for The Ringer who loves TV and sometimes writes about it. She lives in San Diego, but no, she doesn’t surf.
