Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis return to form in 'Freakier Friday'

“That was actually a good movie,” my 14-year-old niece said after a screening of “Freakier Friday.” The high-spirited and surprisingly sturdy sequel to Disney’s 2003 tween favorite reunites Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan as a mother-daughter duo who this time swap bodies with a couple of resentful ninth graders. Given the ages of the characters, I initially thought it might be amusing if my niece and I switched places for this review, an idea dismissed as “cringey” by a girl on her summer vacation who understandably didn’t feel like doing homework. Besides, her patience had already been worn pretty thin by my fumbling to find the right pose for a selfie of us in front of the large cardboard Curtis and Lohan standee in the AMC Boston Common lobby. Gen Z’s eye-rolling disdain for their embarrassing elders provides the comic motor of this often very funny film, and having grown accustomed to being on the receiving end of such withering glares, I think I may have enjoyed the movie even more than she did.

Nobody is about to make a case for Disney’s original 1976 “Freaky Friday” as any kind of classic — one of my favorite useless trivia tidbits is that Jodie Foster starred in it the same year she made “Taxi Driver” — but it’s got an irresistible hook. The story of a mother and daughter being forced to spend a day in each other’s shoes offers lessons that can keep getting relearned through the generations. That’s part of why the 2003 remake was an unexpected late-summer smash, scoring Oscar talk for Curtis (she should have been nominated, it might be her best performance) and rocketing a then-ascendant Lohan to teen superstar status. While undeniably a Disney formula family movie, “Freaky Friday” was one of those pleasant surprises that’s a little smarter and a lot better-acted than it needed to be. The sequel follows suit.

Except now there are four of them. Lohan’s Anna has grown up to be a single mom raising surly, surf bum daughter Harper (Julia Butters) with the help of Curtis’ busybody grandma Tess. The trouble starts when Anna falls for a hunky British widower (Manny Jacinto) who just so happens to be the father of tomboy Harper’s bitter schoolyard rival — prissy, fashionista Lily (Sophia Hammons). The adults meet cute when called to the principal’s office about their offspring’s latest science class squabble, and the two lovebirds end up engaged before the opening credits, despite the fact that these soon-to-be stepsiblings can’t stand each other.

It's during a sleepover at grandma’s house that the old family curse kicks in, with the previous picture’s queasy orientalism here replaced by “Saturday Night Live” vet Vanessa Bayer’s hilarious gig economy fortune teller, so busy plugging her side hustles she keeps forgetting to convey crucial plot information. Nevertheless, Anna and Tess find themselves helpless in the bodies of 15-year-olds who keep getting sent to detention, while Harper and Lily are horrified to suddenly be so decrepit, though they both soon discover that age comes with certain privileges.

In a clever inversion of “The Parent Trap,” the two concoct a scheme to try and split up their mom and dad before they can get hitched and drag the whole unhappy family off to England. The plan even ropes in Anna’s old high school crush (Chad Michael Murray), who got over her ages ago but still carries a torch for Tess. (Long story.) It’s all basically an excuse to send Lohan and Curtis clomping around Los Angeles, creating chaos as Zoomers in ill-fitting, adult bodies. In the process, Harper and Lily will discover that their parents love each other a lot more than they’d thought and the two girls like each other more than they might care to admit. But first they have to make a big mess of things.

The 66-year-old Curtis has been having a moment as of late, winning an Oscar for “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and an Emmy for “The Bear,” even though her performances can be a bit broad for this critic’s taste. (Her turn as a leathery Las Vegas waitress in “The Last Showgirl” was one of the ghastliest things I saw last year.) Luckily, you can’t go too far over the top in a film like “Freakier Friday,” and she hurls herself into the slapstick with cheerful abandon, gamely playing up the indignities of old age as seen through the eyes of a snooty teenager. She still has great chemistry with Lohan, who was stuck being the staid mom during the last movie but here gets to cut loose and be one of the kids. I could have watched a whole film of these two oversized adolescents trying to navigate the grown-up world, referring to Facebook as “a database of old people” or trying to fit in by listening to “some old music… like Coldplay.”

It's heartening to see Lindsay Lohan looking so happy and healthy in a major movie again. Hers was one of the sadder starlet implosions of a tawdry era, going from holding her own opposite Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin in Robert Altman’s “A Prairie Home Companion” to a tabloid party girl punchline. Working at an edgy alt-weekly in the naughty aughts, I wrote some admittedly unseemly stuff about Lohan, but always from a place of sincere admiration. Few critics stumped as hard as I did for her 2007 “I Know Who Killed Me,” a deliriously lurid thriller in which Lohan starred as a druggy stripper who rescues her identical twin, honor-student sister from the clutches of a serial killer. (It’s the R-rated sequel to “The Parent Trap” you never knew you wanted.) She’s a born movie star with charisma to burn, and seemed to genuinely enjoy kidding the world’s hyperbolic reactions to her coming of age in public, most memorably in her "Hermione Growth Spurt” sketch on “Saturday Night Live.”

When things got rough, there was something especially ugly about how those in power went after her. Movie stars behaving badly is nothing new, but I’ve never seen a studio executive go public with a letter like the one chiding the actress for her behavior on the set of 2007’s “Georgia Rule” — a very bad movie that Lohan is quite good in. I’ve likewise never seen the New York Times print anything as seedy or as exhaustively detailed as their on-set account of the making of Paul Schrader and Bret Easton Ellis’ 2013 “The Canyons,” an ambitious, provocative indie in which Lohan starred opposite porn star James Deen and possibly could have resuscitated her floundering career if only the movie had been any good. It's also notable that last year’s dire musical “Mean Girls” remake scrubbed every remotely racy joke from the already-tame 2004 original, but added a gratuitous mention of Lohan’s unprintable tabloid nickname, which has since been removed from digital versions of the film.

I’ve often wondered if my Emma Stone agnosticism has something to do with how she managed to swoop in and seemingly take over Lohan’s career trajectory once she’d become unemployable, like a replacement redhead who actually shows up to work on time. It’s easy to envision an alternate timeline in which Lohan won an Oscar for “La La Land.” It’s also just as easy to imagine a much more tragic ending to this true Hollywood story, which might be another reason why seeing her have so much fun in “Freakier Friday” put me in such a good mood.

This is an ebulliently silly film, awash in bright colors and sunny Los Angeles locations. Director Nisha Ganatra crams the scenes full of quick-cut montages and costume changes. My niece admitted that she usually multitasks during Disney movies, but this one had enough going on to hold her attention. On the way out, we heard a few older members of the press grousing about the picture. One loudly announced it was the worst thing he’d seen all year. My niece waited until he was out of earshot before whispering to me, “Now I understand why people hate film critics.”

“Freakier Friday” is now in theaters.