mark boomer redmond

Lurker (2025)

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Lurker is All About Eve by way of Nightcrawler, with a little bit of The Talented Mr. Ripley thrown in for good measure. Or is it a love story, albeit a bit of a fucked up one? 

Matthew Morning (Théodore Pellerin) is working retail alongside Jamie (Sunny Suljic) at an LA boutique clothing store when mononymous musician Oliver (Archie Madekwe) comes in one day. Matthew quickly puts “My Love Song for You” by Nile Rodgers  on the shop’s sound system, and Oliver is impressed by the man’s musical taste, resulting in Matthew being invited to hang backstage at Oliver’s show that night. Oliver’s entourage member Swett (Zack Fox) and producer Bowen (Wale Onayemi) haze him a bit by making him drop his pants, but when he goes one further and loses his underpants as well, it endears him to them immediately. Matt notices a quiet member of the posse, Noah (Daniel Zolghadri) lurking in the back of the green room before he meets Oliver’s manager Shai (Havana Rose Liu), who takes note of Matty’s apparent infatuation with Oliver and recommends that he find a way to make himself useful if he wants to stick around. When he’s invited to hang out the next day at Oliver’s luxurious home, he finds himself stuck doing menial house chores like taking out the garbage and washing dishes while Bowen and Swett play Call of Duty and watch nature documentaries and Oliver largely seems apathetic to his presence. When he captures some candid footage on a low-res Sony commercial video camcorder of Oliver goofing around in the driveway on a BMX, Oliver lights on the idea of having Matty hang around and work on “the documentary,” which creates friction with Noah, who is the crew’s “official” documentarian. When Matty’s former co-worker Jamie also starts to work his way into Matty’s new social circle, Matty goes to increasingly harmful lengths to ensure that his place in the hierarchy remains unchallenged. 

Lurker is about many things. Matt’s behavior is nebulous; although he’s willing to escalate to physical harm and extortion to remain close to Oliver, the exact reasons are ambiguous enough to offer multiple interpretations. The most straightforward possibility is that Matty is simply obsessively in love with Oliver, and although Oliver himself is only ever clearly seen in the sexual company of women, Matty’s reaction to Oliver’s physical (but most likely platonic) affection demonstrates that the singer is the object of his desire. It’s clear that Shai sees Matt’s desire to be in Oliver’s orbit and may even see that attraction to Oliver as she encourages it initially, while his male friends tease Matt for “sounding like one of [Oliver’s] bitches.” Matty is clearly affected by Oliver’s attention to him, with the bits of fraternal physical affection that Oli gives him acting as an emotional drug, and Oliver’s candid vulnerability with the newest member of his entourage is perhaps too encouraging to the unstable videographer. At one point late in the film, Oliver asks Matty why he’s even around, and Matt tells him that he’s there for the same reason that everyone else around Oliver is, it’s just that he’s more driven and “better at it,” in his own words. It’s not stated explicitly, but the implication is that Oliver’s group, which he previously compared to a family of his own choosing, is made up of clingers-on and sycophants trying to ride his coattails into a life of glamour. As an audience, I don’t think we’re meant to fully believe him and his stated motivations, as this supposed reasoning aligns with some of the things we’ve seen (Matty pretends not to know who Oliver is when he first appears in the store while clearly actually being invested in impressing him with his obscure musical knowledge, which wins him a bid at the golden ring of being in Oli’s crew) but also fails to explain the more psychosexual desire that Matt clearly has. 

The latter of these reasons is on fullest display in two scenes in the film. After Matt has successfully created a situation that allows him to blackmail himself back into Oliver’s home (if not his good graces), Oliver makes an attempt to steal the evidence from Matt’s room while he sleeps, but when Matt wakes up, Oliver lies that he wanted to check in on Matt and see if there is some way to get them back to being friends. Matt seems to accept the sincerity and immediately demands that they wrestle, tangling his limbs with the musician and rolling around with him, over the latter’s protests. Still later, when Oliver is on tour, Matt shows up with a girl to the hotel room where Oliver is hooking up with a woman and the two have their sexual encounters next to one another, Matt staring intensely and lovingly at Oliver the whole time. It’s this last that finally pushes Oliver too far, but for his part, Oliver seems to enjoy the attention at times, as there’s a bit of narcissism inherent to his entire career. Early on in the film, Matt tells him that he thinks Oliver has the potential to be the biggest star in the world, and for a moment it seems like he’s pushed his own apparent sycophancy too far to be believed, but after a beat, Oliver excitedly admits that he thinks the same and that the other members of his crew aren’t pushing him hard enough. Matt feeds into Oliver’s ego and the fact that it comes with a side helping of intense yearning doesn’t set off any alarm bells for Oliver until it’s too late. 

The basic scaffolding of this narrative is, as noted above, very much like All About Eve, with Oliver as the Bette Davis/Margo Channing of the feature, a widely known star, and Matty as Anne Baxter’s Eve Harrington who seeks that same level of fame and adoration. Although he does ultimately see success, the film ends at the premiere of the documentary, and when a fan expresses admiration and inspiration, it’s like the finale of Eve in which a young girl comes to Eve’s hotel room in much the same way she once appeared at Margo’s stage door. Matty takes it further, pushing Jamie off of a ladder (after already trying to separate him from the group at the airport) when he gets jealous of Oliver’s preference for Jamie’s ideas for the album cover over Matt’s. Where Patricia Highsmith’s Ripleyness comes from is in the nature of unstated queer obsession that runs as an undercurrent throughout the whole thing. Matt’s “in love” (read: obsessed) with Oliver, wanting to be with him but also to be him, and it’s all conveyed with great attention to detail. Aside from the use of outdated camera equipment to genuinely create an aesthetic that is so desirable that it’s often recreated digitally, what Matt’s bringing to the table with his old Sony camcorder is something that could easily be accomplished through Instagram style filters, but there’s a true commitment to the essence of truth that Oliver wants to convey with his art, and there’s something to be said for that. 

What I found to be one of the most interesting things about the film is the way that it explores the nature of what it feels like to utterly hate someone who sees you better than anyone else. Although Swett and Bowen treat Matt like a pariah once he blackmails his way back into being part of the crew, he either ignores this or is completely apathetic about it, as all he really wants is what he has: access to Oliver, even if the vibe has shifted completely. Everyone’s mistrust of him and their overt hatred for him is covered by Oliver’s having to keep playing Matt’s game, and even if it feels insincere to us in the audience, it’s sufficient to feed Matt’s internal need for Oliver’s attention and validation. In the end, however, after all that Matt puts Oliver through as part of a creative vision for Oliver’s next album, when Oliver sees the resulting footage for himself, he realizes that Matt has accomplished what he said he would: push Oli when the others would let him rest on his laurels with the fame that he already has. It doesn’t hurt that Oliver himself has dubious ethics; when Matt arrives for his first show, the musician is canoodling with a woman that Swett and Bowen picked out of the crowd for him, and the fact that this is a habit for Oliver is something that Matt is able to use against him. Exactly what Oliver did that Matt has footage of is ambiguous enough that we don’t necessarily turn on him, but allows room for doubt as to how honest any of his interactions are, up to and including his claims to Matt that he can be more honest with him than any of the others. What is it in Oliver that only Matt can see and capture? Is it a genuine (if criminally obsessive and jealous) love that Matt has? Is it a consuming desire to see Oliver become the best that he can be because of that love, or because he, Nightcrawlery, wants to ride the rising waters in Oliver’s wake? It’s unclear. 

This film was on the Black List (in 2020), meaning that it was relatively easy to find the screenplay. Matt is notably less evil in the final film, as the script that I found included him treating his grandmother much more coldly and cruelly, including getting her to pay for his flight back to the US after he gets stranded in London but ignoring her at the airport and taking an Uber (in the film she picks him up without incident). All that really remains of this in the final film is a brief scene in which he yells at her when she tries to talk to him while he’s on the phone with Oliver. There’s also an entire subplot about Oliver’s elderly neighbor, whom Matt (possibly accidentally) kills and then (definitely intentionally) moves into his garage so that he can continue to spy on Oliver’s group which is left out of the film. In the final release, the most violence that occurs is when Matt pushes Jamie off of a ladder (we see him later and, other than a broken nose, he’s fine) and when Oliver’s group beats Matty after they’ve finally had enough. It’s a choice that makes for a more interesting movie to make Matty less of an out and out serial killer and inject a bit more ambiguity, despite the fact that I went into this hoping to see just that kind of obsessive violence. Well worth it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Long Walk (2025)

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I’ve been hearing nothing but good things about The Long Walk, so it was a surprise to me that, among the five-person group with whom I attended the movie, it only got a 20% approval rate (and the one who liked it was me). Among the complaints that I collected in the post-screening debrief was that it felt like torture porn to one, was too violent for others, that the character development was underbaked, and the film was denounced as largely predictable. For the more personally subjective takes, I can say that the film is definitely one of the more gruesomely violent that I’ve seen this year (bar something like Final Destination: Bloodlines, where the violence is more fantastical and cartoonish). For the critiques of structure, I also can’t provide evidence that the film didn’t follow a fairly straightforward narrative throughline or that every character felt fully fleshed out. To the latter, I would argue that the confinement of the narrative to a dwindling band of fifty teenaged boys walking on a road necessitates that backstory and character be revealed through dialogue, which can run counter to what one expects from film as a medium. For the former, I would make a very similar argument; containment of the premise makes the eventuality of the stations of the plot inevitable, but that alone is not inherently a negative. 

Although this wasn’t the first of Stephen King’s novels to be published, it is the first that he wrote, only seeing publication several years after Carrie under King’s pen name Richard Bachman. He began writing it as a college student in the mid-sixties, and I think that these facts are obvious from the text itself — both that it’s highly influenced by the Vietnam War (a time during which widespread media allowed for Americans to see drafted boys get blown to bits on the nightly news for the first time) and that it’s the writing of a young, not-yet-fully-developed author. That’s not entirely a bad thing, however, as it allows for this update of the material (sort of; it’s set in a dystopian future but has all the trappings of this bad future having happened due to something awful in the 1970s, not Next Sunday, AD) to speak to a different social crisis, our contemporary one in which society relegates its youth to die horribly for the viewing pleasure of the masses. If anything, it was perhaps too early, as it feels like an answer to the dystopian YA literature adaptation glut of a decade ago, a commentary on The Hunger Games and its imitators while being a darker, meaner, grislier concept that plays out under a different regime. 

The main character of the film is Ray Garraway (Cooper Hoffman), who submitted himself to a lottery in which there is a 98% certainty that he will die, on the one chance that he will be the survivor of the fifty “Walkers” who wins a massive cash prize as well as the opportunity to make one “wish.” This is over the wishes of his mother (Judy Greer), who has already lost her husband, a victim of state violence after teaching outlawed ideas to his son post-societal collapse. The competition itself is annual and features one boy from every state, all of whom set out to travel down Route 1 on foot, with the caveat that they must maintain a speed greater than three miles per hour, with a system of warnings issued for falling below that threshold before the boy’s “ticket gets punched”—that is, shot in the face by the accompanying military guard, led by “The Major” (Mark Hammil). Other competitors that we spend some time with and get to know include: Richard Harkness (Jordan Gonzalez), the one with big glasses who’s hoping to write a book about what it’s like to participate in the Long Walk; Collie Parker (Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation actor Joshua Odjick), a tough jock; athlete and apparent ringer Billy Stebbins (Garrett Wareing); religious Arthur Baker (Tut Nyuot) of Baton Rouge (represent!); yapper Hank Olson (Ben Wang); and your garden variety Stephen King long-haired antisocial shit-stirrer Barkovitch (Charlie Plummer). The person that Ray grows closest to, however, is Peter McVries (David Jonsson), an orphaned young man with a striking scar on the side of his face. A few of these doomed boys dub themselves “the Musketeers,” but their boisterous false optimism is immediately challenged by the death of the first of their number, a kid named Curley who had clearly lied about his age in order to enter the Walk. Alliances are formed and fall apart, friendships are made and then tragically cut short at the hands of carbine-wielding death squads, and the mental and physical anguish and turmoil play out as the boys’ numbers dwindle. 

The movie I most thought of while watching this film was actually Darren Aronofsky’s 2017 opus mother!, in that I can’t remember any film other than that or The Long Walk that could accurately be described, as Lindsay Ellis did, as “Oops, All Metaphor.” There’s nothing subtle about The Long Walk, from the opening moments to the final seconds, and it’s perhaps that lack of subtlety that lends itself to an interpretation that this film was perhaps too predictable to be fully appreciated. I’d still argue that this is more a function of the premise and its constraints than it is an issue with the film itself, but as always, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There’s no attempt to parse any of the suffering that the boys are going through, and there’s no chance that they’re going to be able to have two winners at the end or really that the “winner” will survive very long after they reach the end of their Walk. Characters say to one another that entering the lottery pool for the Long Walk is technically a choice, but if literally everyone enters because it’s the only chance for any kind of economic movement out of poverty, then it’s not really a choice at all, is it? The movie can get away with wearing its message on its sleeve because all of the characters are teenage boys, so it’s not terribly out of place for them to have these not-that-staggering revelations and feel that they’ve stumbled upon some great wisdom, but I also understand if that feels preachy to certain audiences who are already aligned with the movie’s moral. I would venture that, given the state of media literacy (and actual literacy, for that matter) we’re currently grappling with out here in the real world, I’d warrant that this kind of declarative, undisguised thesis statement may be necessary to get it to stick, but that’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. 

There are some themes for which the film reaches but which fall outside of its grasp. When Ray reveals his true motivation for entering the Walk to Peter, Peter tries to caution him against vengeance, but it’s arguable that Ray’s desire to kill one of the heads of the evil government is actually an excellent way to try and right some of society’s wrongs, if he’s given the chance. We never get a clear idea of just what society’s current shape is, as the narrative simply isn’t as invested in world building as much as it is in exploring the miseries of a life in which you have no choice but to walk (or work) yourself to death; it’s one possible inference now that the entire U.S. is now under the control of the Major as a military despot like Gaddafi or Idi Amin, that slaying the head of that dragon if given the opportunity is a moral imperative. It reminds me a bit of the finale of King’s novel The Dead Zone, in which psychic protagonist Johnny Smith ultimately realizes that he has to end, by any means necessary, the rising political career of a man named Greg Stillson, who will end the world in a nuclear holocaust if he is allowed to ascend to the presidency. The protestations against revenge as a factor are where the film slips into a kind of navel-gazing that isn’t fully tonally consistent with the rest of the text, but when that’s the biggest complaint you can get from me, then you should know that this is a recommendation. 

I do think that it was an interesting choice on the part of the producers to choose Francis Lawrence to direct, considering that he helmed three of the four Hunger Games films as well as prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and the upcoming release Sunrise on the Reaping. He was also the man responsible for Constantine and I Am Legend, which is probably why the latter film seems to be on TV multiple times a week right now: for synergy purposes. The film’s writer is JT Mollner, who wrote and directed last year’s divisive nonchronological Kyle Gallner vehicle Strange Darling, and I’m hoping based on a text conversation with Brandon that his skill here is starting to win our dear editor back over. I wouldn’t have imagined this as a team that would be able to bring this source material to life so well, but it gets a recommendation from me.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Inherent Vice (2014)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Paul Thomas Anderson’s laidback stoner noir Inherent Vice (2014), adapted from the novel by Thomas Pynchon.

00:00 Welcome

04:56 The Roses (2025)
12:58 Throw Momma from the Train (1987)
18:36 The Fantastic Four – First Steps (2025)
27:27 A Room with a View (1985)
41:13 One, Two, Three (1961)
49:11 Lady Vengeance (2005)
54:22 Night of the Juggler (1980)
58:28 High and Low (1963)
1:05:29 The Idiots (1998)

1:11:00 Inherent Vice (2014)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

One, Two, Three (1961)

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The morning after I saw The Roses in theaters, I texted Brandon to let him know that I had seen one of the least funny comedies of all time, but that I had followed that up with a screening of one of the most hilarious pieces of filmic art that I had ever been privileged to witness. Billy Wilder’s 1961 ruckus is entitled One, Two, Three, and by the end of it I was hoarse from laughter. Oddly enough, both this and The Roses contained a performance of the novelty song “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” a coincidence that made me feel a little bit like I was going crazy. 

“Mac” MacNamara (James Cagney) is an American abroad, a Coca-Cola executive living in West Berlin and trying to further the cause of democracy by working to get the beverage behind the Iron Curtain, or rather, he’s trying to leverage that major success into becoming the head of the London office. He gets a call from the home office in Atlanta and is told that he’s going to be responsible for his boss’s teenaged daughter for a few weeks while she’s traveling. Scarlett Hazeltine (Pamela Tiffin) arrives drawling, dim, and charming, and her short time turns into two months, to the slight chagrin of Mrs. Phyllis MacNamara (Arlene Francis). Just as her parents are about to set out for Europe, Scarlett reveals that she’s spent the past six weeks sneaking over to East Berlin and meeting in secret with Otto Ludwig Piffl (Horst Buchholz), a handsome young communist. Worse—they’ve gotten married. It falls to Mac to figure out how to split them up, which he does by getting the boy arrested by framing him for anti-Soviet leanings. Then, when it turns out that Scarlett is pregnant, he has to figure out how to not only spring the kid from an East German prison but also to make him a socially acceptable husband for the genteel Hazeltines before their plane lands. 

The comedy comes at a breakneck pace. Cagney is absolutely fantastic here, delivering some very witty dialogue like he’s got only minutes to live, and at other times bellowing orders at a successive list of underlings, Soviets, and haberdashers like he’s running the navy. The rest of the supporting cast is also a delight, with particularly great performances from Hanns Lothar as Mac’s assistant Schlemmer and Liselotte Pulver as his secretary Fräulein Ingeborg. The fräulein is great fun, as it’s clear from very early on that she and Mac are having an affair of some kind, and when he stops appearing for their “German lessons” (with “special attention to the umlaut”), she threatens to quit, and he must subtly rehire her by asking her to draft up an advertisement that includes “fringe benefits” that she immediately accepts. One of said benefits is an outfit that she saw earlier in the day, and when we see her join him in his misadventures in East Berlin to liberate Otto from the German police, she’s wearing exactly the dress and hat described; still later, when he gives his Soviet “allies” the slip to return Otto to West Germany, he leaves Schlemmer behind in her clothing as a decoy. Schlemmer himself has a habit of clicking his heels together, revealing his former involvement in his nation’s activities in the previous war (he first claims to have been part of the “underground” before it is later clarified that he worked on the literal subterranean trains). 

Lots of the best comedy bits revolve around the supposed lack of ingenuity and progress behind the Curtain, but they become timeless because the film doesn’t rely solely on them. For instance, when attempting to bribe Mac to give them Fräulein Ingeborg, one of the Soviets offers him a “brand new” car that he then admits is exactly the same as a 1937 Nash; later, when a car chase to the Brandenburg gate involves the Soviet crew in hot pursuit of Mac and company, Mac’s chauffeur is surprised to see them being followed by an obsolete car, saying “It looks like a ‘37 Nash!” Said vehicle completely falls apart long before Mac makes it to the border, losing fenders and tires and arriving at the Gate rolling on one of its exposed axles. They still almost catch up, however, as Mac is detained before crossing, only for it to be revealed that the guards want to return the (now empty) bottles of Coca-Cola he had brought as proof of his profession (i.e., a bribe), which calls back to the beginning of the film, where one Mac’s complaints wasn’t that the East Germans were buying Coca-Cola in West Berlin and taking it across the border, not because he doesn’t want to sell to them but because their failure to return/recycle the empties was driving up bottling costs. It’s all very perfectly constructed, which only makes it funnier. 

The film isn’t jingoistic in its devotion to finding comedy only in mocking the film’s communists, however. Some of the jokes, like Otto being tortured by being forced to listen to “Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” over and over again, cut both ways, but there are plenty of jabs made at American foolishness, especially in Scarlett’s extreme naivete. When Mac tells her that she might be found guilty of spreading anti-American propaganda due to her possession of signage that says “Yankees Go Home!”, she’s insistent that it’s not anti-U.S. but anti-Yankee, drawling that, where she’s from, “everybody hates the Yankees.” She’s also adamant that she’s going with Otto to the U.S.S.R. (“That stands for ‘Russia’!”) and that she loves washing his shirts while “he broadens [her] mind.” There are also some great digs in at European aristocrat culture in general, as part of Mac’s attempts to make Otto appealing to an American parent involves getting Count Waldemar von Droste-Schattenburg to adopt the young man, as his title will give him prestige despite the fact that the count himself is working as a bathroom attendant. It’s all very, very good. 

Wilder considered this to be one of his lesser films; I read an interview with him later in life in which he expressed that he didn’t think it was actually all that funny or that it worked, but it’s just as much an overlooked classic in his canon as Ace in the Hole. People may remember him best for Sunset Boulevard or Some Like it Hot, but every time I dig further into his backlog, I love everything that I find. Track this one down if you can.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Roses (2025)

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When we went to see Superman while I was in New Orleans in July, Brandon & I mentioned a couple of trailers that we were both sick of seeing and expressed our lack of interest in the films that they were promoting. One of them was Freakier Friday, which I ended up loving, and the other was The Roses. With apologies to my viewing companions who loved this, unlike with Freakier Friday, this one was just as awful as the trailer made it out to be. 

Theo (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Ivy Rose (Olivia Colman) are at an inflection point in their marriage. It’s been ten years since they first met, when Theo escaped into the kitchen of a restaurant to cool off when another person took credit for his designs at a work dinner, meeting chef Ivy. The two moved to the U.S., where Theo’s just landed a major contract to design and build a maritime museum, and he uses the advance from the project to open Ivy’s dream restaurant, called “We’ve Got Crabs.” Unfortunately, the museum collapses during a storm as a result of his poor handiwork, but the same storm ends up stranding a huge crowd of people at Ivy’s usually-empty restaurant, including a notable film critic. As Theo’s career essentially comes to an end (not helped by his filmed reaction to the collapsing building going viral), Ivy’s suddenly explodes, and the two decide to let her be the breadwinner for a time while he raises their two children, Hattie and Roy. A few years later, the kids have transformed from fun-loving little moppets who ate sugar until they threw up to preteen athletes obsessed with performance and fitness, while Ivy’s empire has expanded through franchising of her restaurant. Although Theo was mollified for a time by Ivy’s funding of his design and construction of their (read: his) dream house, now that he’s done with that and ready to re-enter the workforce, their resentments toward one another eventually bubble over and the two start the process of a divorce, as acrimoniously as possible. 

This film was directed by Jay Roach, whose early-career comedy success with the Austin Powers and Meet the Parents franchises eventually devolved into making things like the poorly received American remake of Le Dîner de Cons in 2010’s Dinner for Schmucks and the toothless political satire The Campaign starring Will Ferrell and Zach Galafianakis. Screenwriter Tony McNamara has a better reputation around these parts, having written Poor Things (and having a hand in writing The Favourite), but while this script is serviceable, it’s not up to par with either of those works. In McNamara’s defense, this feels like a film in which the attitude toward adlibbing was a bit too lenient, although given how clunkily some of the film’s supposed zingers thud to the ground it’s hard to believe that this was the best that this cast could come up with. Andy Samberg doesn’t pull out any of his trademark charm as he sleepwalks through his lines with an identical and static “Can you believe this?” smirking energy, but at least he’s not as out of place as Kate McKinnon’s portrayal of his wife, an oddball whose desire to get into Theo Rose’s pants is as obvious as it is offputting. She does deliver the film’s best line, however, when she admits that she’s thrown caution to the wind because she’s old, her face is melting, and she knows her body’s “working up a stage 4 something” so she might as well live a little. 

Both Samberg and McKinnon’s performances have the air of something that would have worked well if the film had been edited with a little more oomph. Their failure isn’t in the performance (at least not entirely) as much as it is in the pacing and the way that the camera lingers on them a little too long after they do a bit. The same cannot be said for Zoë Chao and Jamie Demetriou, who are bafflingly unfunny in ways that I didn’t imagine possible. If you don’t recognize Chao from her voice work on Creature Commandos or know Jamie Demetriou from Fleabag, you’ll know them from the trailer as the couple doing the “We love your witty banter” bit, which is even less funny in the film than it was in the marketing material. Ncuti Gatwa, who plays Ivy’s head waiter, has a couple of good lines, but he’s also playing his character a bit broad; as I’m currently catching up on Doctor Who after losing interest around 2019 and was just coming to the end of Jodie Whittaker’s run, I was a bit concerned that this would bode poorly for his turn as the title character (having since watched his premier in “The Giggle,” I can say that I’m very looking forward to his time as the Doctor). 

I’ve never seen the Danny DeVito-directed original adaptation of this under the same name as the novel, The War of the Roses, but I can’t imagine that this improves on that one. For one thing, that film features DeVito as both a character (he’s a divorce lawyer) and narrator, and it also seems like that one gets into the actual conflict between the couple a lot earlier in the narrative than this one does. I suppose the omission of “war” from the title was actually a declaration that this movie wasn’t terribly interested in that conflict and would instead be a longer portrait of what is, for the first two acts, a fairly ordinary marriage. By the time Ivy’s making deepfakes of her husband confessing to intentionally botching the maritime museum in order to put the final nail in the coffin and Theo’s bashing the actual stove that belonged to Julia Child to pieces, there’s barely any runtime left. The film’s final moment is the most interesting and novel element, but it’s far too little and comes far too late to save this. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the 1943 suburban noir Shadow of a Doubt, which Alfred Hitchcock described as his personal favorite of his own films.

00:00 Welcome

03:03 Stigmata (1991)
09:15 Manda Bala (Send a Bullet, 2007)
14:15 DEVO (2025)
20:46 Naked Ambition (2025)
25:53 The Naked Gun (1988 – 2025)
35:40 Freakier Friday (2025)
42:30 The Aviator (2004)
48:09 The Game (1997)
51:21 Mauvais Sang (1986)
56:26 Young and Innocent (1937)

1:04:27 Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Young and Innocent (1937)

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After a recent viewing of Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright, I double checked to see if it had already been covered on the site (it had), since I had learned to do this recently after getting a couple of paragraphs into a review of the director’s Frenzy, which Brandon had also already covered. This made me wonder just how many of Hitch’s thriller features we had covered; these account for 40 of the roughly 45 films in his filmography (I say “roughly” since I’m not sure how we would count his earliest, lost films like Number 13 and The Mountain Eagle), and I texted Brandon that we had covered 13 so far, to which he noted that we had already hit 14 if one counts his discussion of Strangers on a Train here. I thought it would be fun to try and do all 40 sometime, and figured I would tackle the next one chronologically after The Lodger. Unfortunately, my local video store does not have a copy of Blackmail!, so I rented Murder!, only to find out that the LaserLight DVD they have in their possession is one of those quick and dirty late nineties/early 2000s releases of a very poor transfer (in fact, The Hitchcock Zone has a warning about this exact DVD). It was, in a word, unwatchable, and that’s coming from someone who buys every unlabelled estate sale VHS he sees just to see what’s on them. I was still in a Hitchcock mood, though, so I decided to see what he had available on the Criterion Collection and stumbled across Young and Innocent, one of his 1937 pictures. The description of the film gave fair warning that the movie did contain a sequence of Blackface, which made me a bit wary. The movie ended up being so much fun and so delightful (in fact, I started to wonder why it wasn’t more well known) that I had completely forgotten about this heads-up by the time that the last ten minutes rolled around, and boy did it negatively affect my perception of this feature overall. 

The film opens on an argument between Christine Clay, a British actress returned home after having success in Hollywood, and her ex-husband Guy, who accuses her of “bringing home boys and men” and refusing to accept that the marriage is over. The following morning, young Robert Tisdall (Derrick De Marney) is walking along a cliffside when he sees a body on the beach and climbs down, discovers Christine dead, and sprints away to get help. His speed is witnessed by two girls who had come down to the water to swim, and despite the fact that he did come back with the police, said coppers immediately decide to believe the teenagers’ interpretation that he was fleeing the scene and arrest him; it certainly doesn’t help that his raincoat was recently stolen and Christine was strangled with a raincoat belt, or that he and Christine knew each other from their stateside film work, where Robert was a writer. Their suspicions deepen when they learn that she has left him a substantial amount of money in her will, and he’s prepared for immediate arraignment. While detained at the station, he faints when he learns of this, and is revived by Erica Burgoyne (Nova Pilbeam), the daughter of the police commissioner, and is totally adorable with her Sealyham terrier named Towser and her beat-up, hand-cranked jalopy. When he’s given a clearly incompetent public defender, he flees the overcrowded courthouse and escapes by hiding in Erica’s car. When she runs out of gas, he pushes the car to the nearest petrol station and uses his last few coins to pay for more fuel before hiding out in an abandoned barn. When Erica returns home, she overhears that he can’t get far since he only has thirty pence, and she comes to believe that he must be innocent, as he claimed. When she returns to the barn to leave behind some food and coins for him, the two barely escape discovery by a couple of her father’s policemen, and she ends up agreeing to take him to the boarding house where a drifting vagrant who supposedly has possession of his raincoat may be able to prove his innocence. 

De Marney and Pilbeam are utterly charming in these roles. We know from the start that Robert is innocent, so even though Erica’s claims that he’s too sweet-looking to be a murderer are dubious at best, we also can’t help but agree when we see Robert’s boyishness, especially when we get to see the two together in all their on-screen chemistry. In a lot of these “innocent man pursued” pictures, Hitch’s leading men often get frustrated and agitated at their situation, and even though this is early in his career, it’s kind of refreshing to see a man who’s at least somewhat enjoying the ride that he’s on. That makes his flirtation with Erica and her eventual willingness to help him try and find the proof of his innocence a nice, charming romance, with two sweet leads who work quite well together. Once they do locate the homeless china-mender, Old Will (Edward Rigby) and enlist him in their mission, he adds even more charm to their little ensemble. Perhaps my favorite character, however, is Erica’s Aunt Margaret (Mary Clare), who appears when Erica and Robert are still heading to the boarding house where Old Will might be found, and she says that she’ll call her father so that he doesn’t get worried and start looking for her. Erica has forgotten that it’s her younger cousin’s birthday and she gets roped into attending her party. Aunt Margaret is a total busybody and a bit of a party bully, but she’s so arch and funny that she’s much more entertaining than she is frustrating. Her husband, Uncle Basil (Basil Radford, who would appear the following year in The Lady Vanishes), is less suspicious and can see that blossoming romance between Erica and Robert so clearly that he ends up helping them slip away. 

The general light-heartedness of this one also makes for a very fun comedic outing, but it’s also not without its fascinating set pieces, either. Besides the aforementioned child’s birthday party scene, Erica’s home life with her father and several younger brothers is also quite charming. It’s clear that her relationship with her family is a loving one, and all of the boys get enough characterization that it’s a delight to watch them all play off of each other. There’s a studious and up-tight one with glasses, the more jocular and athletic middle boy, and the precocious youngest who ends up bringing a rat to the dinner table at one point. This makes the later more serious scene in which her father shows her the resignation letter that he intends to deliver that day (rather than arrest his own daughter, whom he knows has abetted an escaped inmate) all the more impactful. For comedic set pieces, there’s a very good one at the restaurant called Tom’s Hat where Robert’s raincoat first went missing, when a couple of vagrants get into a brawl with some truckers that they feel are giving away a little too much information about Old Will, with Robert forcing his way inside in order to try and save Erica from the kerfuffle, only for her to have already made her way out of the building without any of his help. On the more dramatic side, the abandoned barn makes for a beautiful location, and there’s also a great setpiece where Robert, Old Will, and Erica (and Towser!) drive into an abandoned mine shaft to evade pursuing police, only for the shaft to give way beneath them and swallow the car as they desperately try to climb out of it before it falls. There’s also a great dance sequence at the end where Old Will, having been given an offscreen makeover that he despises, goes to a fancy hotel with Erica to see if he can identify Christine’s killer there, and it’s a sight to behold. 

Unfortunately, it’s this final scene in the hotel where the film gets a little too ugly to swallow. It wasn’t uncommon for live musical performances of the era to take advantage of the minstrel show aesthetic, and every single member of the ten-piece band performing at the hotel ballroom is in Blackface, and it’s quite awful. I know that I’m looking at this through a modern lens and the contemporary logic was that it would make sense for the killer to have a job where he’s in some kind of disguise, and being painted to look like a racist caricature made for an understandable method of hiding in plain sight during a time when that kind of entertainment was common. Still, I can’t help but be sickened by the final ten minutes, especially since this one was chugging along at such a nice pace up until that point. I was a little curious as to why the quality control on the subtitles for this film seemed to be barely up to snuff, as the caption “[inaudible]” appears more here than in any other film I’ve ever seen, over a dozen times. Sometimes it’s character names that perhaps the captioner didn’t feel confident in providing or slang of the time that a younger staffer at Criterion might simply be unfamiliar with (in the very opening scene, Guy tells Christine that he won’t accept her “Reno divorce,” which the subtitles render as “[inaudible] divorce”), but at other times it’s just fast child-speech that a trained ear should be able to hear or it’s totally clear dialogue. It made it feel like this was done haphazardly and lazily, and I was keeping track of what I heard in order to email Criterion to recommend an update, but by the end of the film, all of the wind in my sails had gone out after seeing the Blackface sequences, and I get the feeling that whoever was in charge of getting this up onto the Criterion Channel likely had the same deflation. I can’t say that I blame them. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Aviator (2004)

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I’ve been slowly but surely working my way through Martin Scorsese’s filmography; I gave a rundown of what I’ve been up to in my Cape Fear review here, and I’ve worked my way from having only previously seen Shutter Island, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and The Last Waltz as of last year to now also having seen Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Cape Fear (obviously), Casino, and now The Aviator. At about halfway into the film’s staggering 171-minute runtime, I turned to my friend and stated that, although I understand that this might be a heretical opinion, I thought it was so far Scorsese’s best work that I had seen. After viewing the film’s more meandering and slow-moving second half, I’m not so sure that’s the case, but it may still very well be my favorite. All cards on the table, however, almost all of that enjoyment comes in the form of an absolutely marvelous performance from Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn, which having just watched Suddenly Last Summer, it’s pitch-perfect and an utter joy to watch. That the film becomes less interesting when Hepburn moves on from being courted by the playboy Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) to starting her affair with the still-married Spencer Tracy, as she did in real life, is not a surprise. 

The Aviator is the story of one Howard Hughes, whose Houston-based family business made a fortune in drill bits for oil wells, and the film opens on Hughes engaging in his two great passions: aviation (naturally) and movies. He hires Noah Dietrich (John C. Reilly) to manage his business so that he can put all of his attention into the completion of his war picture Hell’s Angels, a cause which ultimately takes him over three years and costs $4M ($77.3M in 2025, adjusted for inflation), nearly bankrupting him, but catapulting him into the public consciousness as the archetypal 20th Century Renaissance Man: a brilliant engineer, a playboy with the most beautiful women in Hollywood, and an artist. He also completely seizes up under any kind of greater attention, represented by him having a “whiteout” as the frame fills with light. Hepburn is immediately drawn to him, and the couple’s romance is quite a lot of fun, as she’s an unconventional woman who’s drawn to him, dazzled but not blinded, and she helps to ground him. His ongoing filmmaking career leads him to dalliances with other actresses while his oversight of Hughes Aircraft demands more of his attention, and after a disastrous visit to the Hepburn family compound, the two split up. All of this is intercut with Hughes continuing to design and engineer various aircraft, with one such plane making him, at the time, the fastest man who had ever lived. 

When we did our podcast episode about Boogie Nights, Brandon drew a connection between it and Goodfellas, specifically in both films’ bifurcation into a “fuck around” half and a “find out” half, with 1980 as the dividing line. Casino has that same symmetrical structure, and The Aviator does too, among some other Scorsese-isms that I’ve started to notice, like federal agents being used for petty retaliation and planes running out of fuel while flying over golf courses. Unlike in Casino and Goodfellas, however, the main character’s downfall in the “find out” back half are a result of Hughes’s mental illnesses, rather than a more traditional tragic flaw, like Sam Rothstein’s need to be envied or Henry Hill’s inability to break free from the allure of the power that organized crime gave him. The film essentially shouts at you through a bullhorn that Scorsese sees himself in Hughes and although he doesn’t shy away from portraying Hughes’s outlandish behavior like extremely precise eating habits, obsessive handwashing (to the point of causing himself to bleed), and paranoid wiretapping of his girlfriend Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale)’s phones, it’s not those things that bring Hughes down. Scorsese’s Hughes is a Randian achievement of infamy by merit, precision, and perfectionism, and his failures have to be that he’s too much of a perfectionist and he pushes himself past his limits — the kinds of things that you would disingenuously call weaknesses in a job interview. The appearance of an antagonizing force in the form of PanAm president Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin) and his senator patsy Ralph Owen Brewster (Alan Alda) moves the narrative along but it’s not really Trippe or Brewster that Hughes is ever really fighting; it’s himself and his increasingly severe compulsive acts. Once he overcomes the agoraphobia he develops following the latest of several experimental aircraft crashes and delivers a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-style speech to Brewster’s subcommittee, the narrative thrust has hit its climax. Hughes was an ubermensch, albeit an eccentric one, and Scorsese is the Hughes of the film world. 

I’ll admit that this is an easy leap to make when interacting with any text, but there’s a special focus on Hughes’s tenderness in his approach to the machines that he creates. Hughes doesn’t do “test pilots”; he gets out there and he flies the thing himself, and the fact that his cockpit and his director’s chair are the same seat is made very literal early on when he flies around amidst the pilots shooting Hell’s Angels. When something doesn’t work, he keeps trying, even when the need for it has passed. He first dreams up the “Hercules” air carrier as a means to help the troops in WWII, but despite taking government development money, he doesn’t get the thing completed until after the war is over because it has to be perfect, just like a film has to be perfected before it gets sent out to the general public, even if doing so means that it misses its cultural moment. I have to admit that none of that is all that interesting to me, just like I’m not really all that interested in any of the film’s various historical inaccuracies (the film presents Hughes as making his firebrand subcommittee speech after coming out of his reclusive “locked in a movie theater and pissing in jars” period, when in fact the committee hearings were 1947, a solid ten years prior to his 1957 isolation). What is interesting to me is that this is a film that I don’t think could be made today.

The Aviator was released during what was probably the last time the general public was willing to accept an epic narrative about a real life “hero” of public stature. Contemporary figures of equivalent wealth, status, and public identity are far too accessible to the general public, and the extent to which some of the most powerful people in the world have sacrificed their mystery and allure on the altar of social media (not to mention their morals and ethics) and flat-out embarrassed themselves on an international stage means that they’ve forsaken any awe or reverence that they might have otherwise had. The pursuit of being the most liked boy by a vocal minority of people who are overrepresented online has shattered any opportunity for a contemporary millionaire inventor to be respected, for better or worse, not to mention that it’s fundamentally broken many of our critical institutions. Retroactively, it makes this entire genre seem like propaganda, and it probably always was, intentionally or not. That’s just the way of the future. 
Finally, I found this one a fun experiment in seeing what Scorsese would do with a more family-oriented picture. Most of his films are R-rated and notoriously so, with Goodfellas setting the record for the most uses of the word “fuck” in a movie at 300, a record that was broken five years later with 422 uses in Casino, and when the upper records started getting a little crowded, The Wolf of Wall Street had 569 uses in 2013. I’m no moral guardian, but I will say that there’s something to be said for playing around with moderation as The Aviator, as a PG-13 film, got exactly one “fuck” and it hit a lot harder than any single or cumulative use in the other Scorsese pictures I’ve seen. Part of this is the nature of the setting, which allows for Blanchett’s Hepburn to gush out “Golly!” and many other early period accurate transatlanticisms (and it’s a hoot every time). Scorsese usually goes for broke by leaning into the extremes, and it was interesting to see him do something different. This wasn’t his first non-R film, of course, as Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, New York, New York, and The King of Comedy were all rated PG (albeit they predate the PG-13 rating), as is The Age of Innocence, and his Dali Lama picture Kundun was PG-13, but this feels like his first movie that you could catch on cable on a Saturday afternoon during a family get together and reasonably expect most of the people present to enjoy it.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)

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I had a very difficult time getting anyone interested enough in the new Naked Gun to go see it with me, so much so that Brandon beat me to the punch with his review of it. Suffice it to say, we are in agreement that it’s a delight. And man, Elon Musk sure is catching strays out there in theaters this year, isn’t he? Between very thinly veiled versions of him appearing as villains in The Naked Gun, M3GAN 2.0, Superman, Mountainhead, and LifeHack, and a stand-in for him realizing that his whole life has been wasted and he’s likely hellbound in The Phoenician Scheme, this really hasn’t been a good year for him, has it? I doubt we’re going to Hollywood Carol him into turning his life around, but it sure is nice to see him getting egg on his face. But let’s return to a simpler time, when a movie’s evil villain didn’t have to be the richest man in the world, and when simply being a high-level drug trafficker with designs on killing Queen Elizabeth II was enough. 

Lt. Frank Derbin (Leslie Nielsen) of LAPD’s special unit called Police Squad has just returned from a vacation overseas, where he had a bit of a busman’s holiday in the form of busting up a conference of the United States’ then-greatest enemies, including Yasser Arafat, Ayatollah Khomeini, Idi Amin, and Mikhail Gorbachev (whose famous birthmark Derbin reveals to be a fake). Upon returning home, he learns that his girlfriend has left him and his partner, Officer Nordberg (O.J. Simpson), is in the hospital after attempting to bust a heroin operation aboard a ship in L.A. Harbor, where he was caught and shot by men who work for shipping magnate Vincent Ludwig (Ricardo Montalban). Nordberg’s wife begs Drebin to find the men responsible, but heroin found on Nordberg’s jacket points to him having been on the take; Drebin is given only 24 hours by Captain Ed Hocken (George Kennedy) to clear Nordberg’s name, as Police Squad has been authorized by Mayor Barkley (Nancy Marchand, aka Livia Soprano) to take charge of security operations for the impending visit of Liz II. Meanwhile, Ludwig instructs his unsuspecting secretary, Jane (Priscilla Presley), to get close to Drebin and learn what he knows under the guise of wanting to purge his company of any potential illegal activities. Jane and Frank immediately fall in love, but can he stop Ludwig’s plan to assassinate the queen, clear Nordberg’s name, and butcher the national anthem in 85 minutes? I mean 24 hours? 

I have pretty strong memories of watching The Naked Gun as a kid, but I think that I probably saw the film’s first sequel more often, given that it was likely cheaper to license for television. At the very least, very few of these gags were familiar to me (other than the scene in which Derbin accidentally drops Ludwig’s pen into a fish tank and ends up killing one of the prized tropical fish in the process of fishing it out). I think part of that might have been that child-me would have been a little bored by the film’s ending, as it spends a pretty long time at a baseball stadium, and as a reluctant little league player during the wave of Angels in the Outfield, Field of Dreams, Little Big League, and countless other family baseball movies, I would have tuned out. In fact, as much as I was enjoying this movie, the back half is largely eaten up by Frank attempting to stop an assassination attempt at Anaheim Stadium, and I started to feel my opinion of it waver. Luckily, the location allows for a lot of beats in which Nielsen gets to do something hilarious, which made up for the fact that the film parks itself there for so long. One of the best bits involves Frank faking his way onto the field by knocking out and taking the place of a famed international opera singer, which leads to him ending up on the mound, “singing” a half-remembered version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It’s a delight, as is all of the stadium nonsense during which the queen is subjected to the vagaries of a baseball game, like having to ask someone to get out of your seat or ingest “dugout dogs” (one of which Ludwig discovers, to his horror, contains the remains of one of his lackeys who fell into the vat while trying to kill Frank). 

Humor is subjective, and one of the difficult things about reviewing it, as we’ve said before, is that the issue with a lot of discussions of comedy is that they can often simply devolve into recapping the jokes or reciting the dialogue. What I will say about the friend that I was finally able to convince to go see the new Liam Neeson Naked Gun was that he was glad I talked him into it, and that although he didn’t enjoy the sight gags as much as I did, he found the dialogue very funny, and I think that’s a testament to what works about Naked Gun conceptually. I love all of the visual puns and the playing around with the language of film (there’s a particularly funny bit where the camera pans from one room to another, with most of the characters going through the set door while Frank merely steps around the edge of the set wall), but even if that’s not something that you’re going to enjoy as much as I did, you’ll probably still get a kick out of the cleverness of the dialogue. I’d still say that this one ranks below my personal favorite spoof flick, Top Secret!, but that’s a high bar to clear, and I’ll admit that it’s not without its flaws—in particular, that it spends several minutes doing a direct parody of The Blue Lagoon rather than the genre tropes that it traffics in for most of the runtime is arguably worse than the baseball digression that happens in Naked Gun. 

It’s also interesting to look back at this one and see how much the most recent film drew from it without needing an audience to be familiar with its specifics. There is, of course, the scene in which two characters’ innocent misadventures are mistaken for degeneracy by an observer, Frank’s horny clunkily inelegant internal monologue upon meeting his love interest, and the scenes in which Frank gets raked over the coals by his superior. More specifically, when John Huston was explaining his master plan to his cronies in this year’s sequel, I said aloud, to my companion, “Isn’t this the exact plot of Kingsman?” (It is.) But the “use technology to brainwash people into committing acts of violence” villain plan is actually taken directly from the original, albeit on a much larger scale. In this film, Ludwig is able to use a remote device to turn people into Manchurian assassins; it’s never explained in any detail, as we just get close-ups of the sleeper agents’ watches when he pushes the button, and that’s all that we need to know. Brevity is the soul of wit, after all. 

If you’re feeling a little nostalgic for an old school Naked Gun experience after seeing the new one, or need something to tide you over until you get the chance to check it out yourself, you really can’t go wrong with this one. Unusually for a comedy of its age, very few of the jokes have aged poorly, especially in comparison to some of “racial” comedy in the Hot Shots! movies; it’s possible that the film’s opening could come across as offensive if one wasn’t aware that the characters at the conference are specific world leaders/figures of the time, but that can’t be helped. If anything, the only thing that really dates this is the presence of the late (“alleged”) killer O.J. Simpson, but he’s not given much to do in this one other than be injured over and over again. That’s got to be worth it to somebody, right? 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Freakier Friday (2025)

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I am not immune to nostalgia bait. In fact, I’ve fallen for it in the past. I watched the entire first season of Girl Meets World based solely on my fondness for its 1990s predecessor (it’s terrible). I gave the 2016 Ghostbusters a pretty high rating that I’ve come to regret greatly over the years, and I genuinely love the Walt Disney personality-laundering Emma Thompson/Tom Hanks picture Saving Mr. Banks. Additionally, having babysat for younger cousins while I was in college and having a goddaughter born in 2009, I continued to be familiar with the larger Disney Channel oeuvre long after I aged out of their target demographic. I’m not going to argue that their work was ever especially great, but the pre-That’s So Raven era had a wider variety of original programming, with action series like The Famous Jett Jackson, for-kids supernatural spookfests like So Weird, and laugh track-free coming-of-age dramedies like Flash Forward (I know I’m really dating myself with the last one). As the channel grew more widely available at the basic cable level rather than at the premier price point, the popularity of Lizzie Mcguire was surpassed even by Raven, which people are quite fond of, but it’s Raven (and, to a lesser extent, Even Stevens) that committed what I would consider the network’s original sin: costuming became hypercolorful and quirky, characters were constantly delivering pithy one-liners and mugging to the audience, the laugh track became omnipresent, and everything became very same-y. It’s a generational curse, and one that I saw play out in many episodes of the shows that I was subjected to (or, as was the case with Girl Meets World, those shows to which I subjected myself). I’m almost 40 years old; I should not be burdened with so much knowledge of Austin & Ally or Wizards of Waverly Place or Suite Lifes on land and sea, and yet I am. (Good Luck Charlie is actually pretty good, though.) 

The waters that Freakier Friday is navigating are overcrowded. Legacy sequels to cash in on millennial nostalgia have flooded the market in the last decade, and while big budget genre franchise pictures like the Star Wars sequel trilogy and the ongoing Jurassic World debacle have been successful commercially with mixed critical reception, 90s/early-aughts family and romantic comedy follow-ups have generally been poorly received on both fronts. I think the biggest obstacle here is that the popularity of the Disney Channel School of Hyperactive Comedy Acting means that all sitcoms produced for children has to have all those hallmarks: aggressively cartoonish facial acting, forced quippiness, etc. I have a fondness for She’s All That despite it not being a very good movie, but then you graft the modern hyper style onto the recent He’s All That follow up and it just doesn’t work. People who grew up watching the Y2K Freaky Friday were going to turn out for Freakier Friday regardless, and the sequel could have easily and lazily taken the path of least resistance to churn out a low-effort, reference-heavy movie that mostly consisted of the teenage girls making goobery big-eyed faces over unimaginative puns and small cameos from returning stars Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis. I was particularly concerned when every trailer that appeared before my screening was for an animated kids movie, which didn’t bode well for how much the feature would care about the adult members of its audience, but I was pleasantly surprised. 

It’s been 20 years since psychologist Tess Coleman (Curtis) and her musician daughter Anna (Lohan) body-swapped on the eve of Tess’s marriage to Ryan (Mark Harmon) so that they could walk a mile in each other’s shoes and gain a better understanding of one another. Anna has since “chosen to be a single mother,” has a career in musical management, and has her own issues with understanding her teenage daughter: tomboy surfer Harper (Julia Butters). Harper’s conflict with a recent transfer student to her school, British fashion-conscious Lily (Sophia Hammons), results in both of their parents being called to a conference with the principal, and it’s here that Anna meets Lily’s widowed father Eric (Manny Jacinto), and sparks fly immediately. Six months later, it’s now the eve of Anna’s wedding, and Harper and Lily are no closer to getting along, with Harper fearing that the family will move to London and leave her California life behind, while Lily worries that her father will choose to settle full time in LA, preventing her from attending the fashion school that she wants and severing the connection she feels to her late mother. When the two instigate a food fight, they’re punished by being forced to have a sleepover at Tess’s the night after Anna’s bachelorette party. It’s there that both the reluctant soon-to-be-sisters as well as Anna and Tess meet palm reader Madame Jen (Vanessa Bayer), who channels something that results in all four of the women swapping bodies. Harper exchanges places with her mother while Lily and Tess are swapped, and your typical body-swap antics ensue. While Tess-in-Lily and Anna-in-Harper are forced to go to school and attend the detention that the teens got themselves into, Lily-in-Tess and Harper-in-Anna set out to make sure that the wedding never happens, essentially making this a kind of spiritual sequel to Lohan’s other big Disney remake, The Parent Trap. This connection is made even more clear when Elaine Hendrix, who played the undesirable potential stepmother in Trap, appears here as a fashion designer who’s tasked with styling Ella (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), Anna’s pop star client whose concert tour launch is the same weekend as the wedding. 

This is a solidly made little comedy with a surprising amount of heart. If the audience is meant to be teenagers, it refuses to talk down to them, and the film is just as interested in the stakes of Anna’s wedding as it is in the teenagers’ plots, and there’s even some time spent developing Tess’s stakes as well. Perhaps the intended target audience will be more emotionally invested in the points of view of Lily and Harper. I’m not really sure how having to finish high school in Los Angeles is going to affect Lily’s ability to attend a London fashion institute or that Harper having to move to London is going to be the end of the world, but it’s the kind of thing that kids and teens think are very high stakes (or, I could say, those are very Disney Channel Original Movie stakes), so it makes sense. That this is a text one will have different feelings about depending upon what age you are is a testament to how much more thoroughly thought-out this narrative is in comparison to more half-hearted attempts to go to the intellectual property well again. The plot between Anna and Eric is genuinely sweet; Harper has only ever seen Eric through the narrow lens of adolescence, as the father of her nemesis and an interloper who might upend her whole life, but she gets to see him through her mother’s eyes and witness how much he genuinely loves not only Anna but Harper as well. Eric’s love for Anna is clear (it doesn’t hurt that Manny Jacinto is perhaps the most beautiful man in the world), and we also get to see how much Anna loves him, and that insight into the adult world makes both of the girls see how selfishly they’ve behaved and hurt the people around them and try to stop their parents from calling off the wedding that they’ve spent most of the film trying to prevent. 

The film makes a very smart choice in passing off most of the heavy emotional lifting to its adult cast. Lily has a tear-filled breakdown near the end when she finally opens up about the fact that her homesickness for the UK is really just her missing her mother and that she knows she’s acted out very badly, and that her mother would be happy that her father found love again and would be disappointed in her for her actions, and the fact that Lily’s in Tess at the time means that Curtis gets to lean on decades of performing to sell the performance. Curtis is clearly having the time of her life in this movie, as she gets some great physical comedy work, crawling around on the floor, putting on a fashion show, and doing some good bits about what it’s like to  suddenly inhabit an ailing, aging body. Mark Harmon barely appears in the film, but in one of the scenes he makes an impression in, he and Tess have to compete in their Pickleball tournament, and Curtis is having so much fun that I had fun, too. Lohan isn’t called upon to do quite as much, since Jacinto’s “perfect husband material” material does most of the work in the scenes where Harper-in-Anna learns to think about someone other than herself, but she’s giving it her all in other areas. Part of the girls’ plan involves trying to get Anna’s high school boyfriend Jake (Chad Michael Murray) to fall back in love with Anna, and the directions that Lily gives Harper-in-Anna are comedically misinterpreted, and it’s a fun scene, made all the better by the fact that the teens are naturally completely blind to the fact that all these years later it’s Tess that Jake’s still horny for. It’s good comedy, and not what I was expecting from a decades-late sequel to a Disney remake I saw once twenty years ago because I was babysitting. (It even comes back around at the end when Jake’s date to Anna’s wedding is wearing the exact same dress that Curtis wore in Freaky Friday, sporting a similar haircut.) 

As for the actual teenage actresses, they both do good work with the material that they’re given, and most of their scenes are comedic. Butters merely has to play Anna-in-Harper as stressed out about making sure that Harper-in-Anna gets to her and Eric’s immigration interview and that Ella doesn’t psych herself out of her tour opening performance over her recent breakup. Hammons has a bit more meat to chew on, with one of her best scenes being Tess-in-Lily once again encountering Stephen Tobolowsky’s teacher character (he hasn’t been able to retire because the school put all of their retirement funds into cryptocurrency) and once again using her psychological skills to try and manipulate him. She also gets an emotional scene, too, and she pulls it off quite well. I hope that they had as much fun making this as Jamie Lee Curtis obviously did, and the end credits blooper reel lends itself to that conclusion. And hey, Rosalind Chao was there! I always love to see her. Perhaps the best sequence in the film is the aforementioned pickleball tournament, which sees an appearance from June Diane Raphael as an aggressive player named Veronica. That means, with her appearance in Weapons, she appeared in both of the movies that topped the box office last week (thanks to my buddy Zach for pointing this out). If it weren’t for the fact that shouting “It’s June August! It’s June August” from my porch would make sense to no one, I’d be doing it. 

Freakier Friday is surprisingly heartfelt and earnest, and it’s also candy for your brain. Why on earth do two adult women get in on Ella’s Rolling Stone shoot? Who cares? If you’ve been burned by this particular brand of nostalgic entrapment before, this one might heal that wound. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond