‘Freakier Friday’ doesn’t deliver nearly as much as it should, given its cast and the potential of its premise – one that recalls a wave of 1980s body-swap comedies like ‘Vice Versa’, ‘All of Me’, and ‘Chances Are’. I used to write about such films in the context of the afterlife and whether the mind can survive the dissolution of the body, perhaps even inhabiting someone else’s frame. But instead of focusing on character depth, this film opts for a kind of scattershot breadth that confuses more than it entertains.

The setup is intriguing: four characters swap bodies – a mother and daughter, and a grandmother and the daughter’s best friend. The inclusion of a non-family member in the swaps means that every time they appear, you’re mentally recalculating whose mind is in whose body. Unfortunately, the characters themselves are sketched thin. They’re all well-off, living in large houses and, in the case of Lindsay Lohan’s Anna Coleman, managing the careers of songwriters. The main teenage conflict is small-scale: one wants to move to London, the other to stay in California. When their divorced parents plan to marry each other, the girls aren’t convinced they like each other enough to become stepsisters.

The swap happens via a contrived encounter with a psychic who isn’t even aware of her own abilities – a far cry from the comic precision Whoopi Goldberg brought to ‘Ghost’. From there, we get the predictable antics: the grandmother is now a teenage girl; Lindsay Lohan is in her daughter’s body; there’s shouting, screaming, and frantic rushing about. It’s light, loud, and ultimately toothless, and although the cast look like they’re enjoying themselves, no one is truly being challenged.

One of the film’s strangest missteps is in the vocal performances. Everyone speaks in their own voice rather than adopting the vocal mannerisms of the person whose body they now inhabit. Imagine Jamie Lee Curtis speaking with a teenage accent, or a teenager mimicking Curtis’s clipped delivery – it could have been funny that way, but it never happens.

Given Lohan’s turbulent personal life, there was an opportunity to draw on her public persona to deepen her character, but the film stays relentlessly safe. At its core, it’s a Disney production, unwilling to mine the darker or more complex material lurking just beneath the surface. There’s a potentially rich irony in casting a former wild child as a stressed, conformist middle-aged mother, but it’s never explored. Instead, we get a movie that feels stuck in 2003 in tone, pacing, and sensibility. Curtis doesn’t deliver a particularly layered performance, though there are faint echoes of her Oscar-winning role in ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’, another story of parallel existences. Still, ‘Freakier Friday’ never comes close to that film’s inventiveness or emotional depth, and the result is a glossy, undercooked comedy that plays it far too safe.