FREAKY

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

Slasher movies and body-swap movies are both as old as time, it seems, at this point . . . or at least forty to fifty years. Psycho , arguably the grandfather to all slasher films, goes back to 1960 and has been imitated ad nauseam. The original Freaky Friday was released in 1976, was remade in 2003, has had a couple of TV iterations, and featured a concept either ripped off or cleverly tweaked in countless other movies. It would seem there’s nothing left to do with either of these genres.

Think again! Enter Freaky, which drops the second word of that original body-swap title and conveniently makes for a perfect slasher movie title mashup with the body swap concept. It’s almost surprising nobody thought of this sooner. And to be honest, that clever conceptual twist almost makes the movie worth watching on its own.

Even better are the two bodies that get swapped: a serial killer and a teenage girl in high school. To be frank, the script, by Michael Kennedy and Christopher Landon, leaves a lot to be desired. The opening sequence features shades of the original Scream, only without any of that movie’s satirical wit—we just see several teenagers get dispatched in semi-innovative ways by a giant brute in a mask. Here is villain name is coined “The Butcher,” and Christopher Landon, who also directs, goes out of his way to establish long-worn slasher movie tropes. It would work better if it had any satirical edge of its own, rather than playing as just as corny as any other subpar slasher movie.

What absolutely saves Freaky, then, is the inspired casting: Vince Vaughn, a truly giant and imposing man, as The Butcher—this guy may have an established record in comedy, but he easily slips into the role of the creep. (He played Norman Bates in the 1998 remake of Psycho, after all.) The thing is, if Vaughn stayed “The Butcher” for the entirety of this movie, it would be absolutely forgettable and easily written off. It’s when The Butcher stabs a high school girl with a cursed antique dagger and swaps bodies with her that he truly shines, with a flair of empathy for teenagers, never playing it campy, the ample humor all coming from the fish-out-of-water context.

Vaughn isn’t even the first grown man to play a teenage girl surprisingly well: Jack Black did it first in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017). These are two very different teeange girls, though: like any category of human, they contain multitudes. Millie, for her part, is reserved and meek, still grieving the loss of her dad a year before—a plot device a little too heavy for a movie so otherwise enamored with ridiculously gruesome murders and gallows humor, but it serves as some approximation of a launching pad for Millie’s character development.

Millie, by the way, is played by Pokémon: Detective Pikachu’s Kathryn Newton, and I don’t want her to be completely overshadowed by Vince Vaughn (both literally and figuratively), as when she plays The Butcher, she is rather delightful in her own right. Millie is far less interesting when playing herself—the same being the case, of course, when Vaugh is The Butcher, who is just a raving psychopath who doesn’t get even a shred of his own backstory. That would detract from the novelty of the film’s concept, I guess? In any case, it’s when Vaughn plays Millie, and Newton plays The Butcher, that Freaky is fun as hell. Even the dialogue gets much better.

We’re also treated with a delicious supporting appearance by Alan Ruck, who plays a hardass teacher who is an asshole for no good reason (honestly, his behavior towards Millie strains believability). He really exists only to be a sacrifice to one of the film’s more entertainingly gruesome turns, and on that front he does not disappoint.

Millie also has two best friends, a Black girl and a gay white boy, Nyla and Josh (Misha Osherovich and Celeste O’conner), whose respective race and sexuality evidently only exist for Josh utter the honestly kind of hacky line, “You’re Black and I’m gay: we’re dead!” Still, they wind up sharing more screen time with Vince Vaughn than they do Kathryn Newton, and the juxtaposition never really gets old. In fact, Freaky doesn’t wast too much time before Millie convinces Nyla and Josh that it’s her inside that huge man’s body, albeit after a pretty funny scene where they quite understandably think he’s the town killer. The somewhat lame twist at the end is slightly closer to a waste of time, but still offers a satisfying conclusion for Millie.

The truth is, even though Freaky has a ton of potential it’s frankly just too lazy to realize, I still had a great time watching it. This movie still offers everything you’d want from either a slasher movie or a body swap movie, creating something novel and entertaining just by mashing them together. Both Vince Vaughn and Kathryn Newton give performances that are better than the movie deserves, and in so doing make it a fun couple of hours.

Some teenage girls, you have to watch your back.

Oerall: B