Freaky

For about 10 years Vince Vaughn was the clown prince of mid-tier com­e­dy. Lead­ing parts (Old School, Dodge­ball), sup­port­ing roles (Mr and Mrs Smith, Anchor­man), cameos (Zoolan­der) – he played them all, and became a part of the Hol­ly­wood set dubbed ​‘The Frat Pack’ along­side Ben Stiller, Will Fer­rell, the Wil­son broth­ers and Jack Black.

But as the bro com­e­dy died a death, Vaughn’s roles changed too; his stark appear­ances in Brawl in Cell­block 99 and Dragged Across Con­crete were a far cry from the hal­cy­on days when the Wil­son-Vaughn part­ner­ship was going strong.

It’s a pleas­ant sur­prise to see Vaughn hav­ing some fun again then, and Freaky feels much clos­er in tone to his ear­li­er work than his recent out­put. From the mind that brought us Hap­py Death Day and Hap­py Death Day 2U comes a twist on Mary Rodgers’s body swap nov­el Freaky Fri­day, which sees Vaughn play a ser­i­al killer who switch­es bod­ies with his teenage victim.

An absurd – but promis­ing! – con­cept, with a sol­id cast: ris­ing star Kathryn New­ton plays the stu­dent in ques­tion, Mil­lie Kessler, while Celeste O’Connor and Misha Osherovich are great as her best friends. But it’s Vaughn’s vehi­cle, and he plays a teenage girl sur­pris­ing­ly well, adopt­ing famil­iar man­ner­isms and vocal pat­terns to win­ning effect. Unwill­ing­ly inhab­it­ing the body of the ​‘Bliss­field Butch­er’ and now framed for his crimes, Mil­lie has to work to reclaim her body, while the psy­chopath using it starts stalk­ing her classmates.

There are some gross-out mur­der scenes which will sat­is­fy the hor­ror set, and Vaughn is clear­ly hav­ing a blast while New­ton gets an oppor­tu­ni­ty to vamp it up as an almost silent stalk­er. They make for a charis­mat­ic duo, and there’s def­i­nite­ly some fun to be had here, but the thrills fade pret­ty fast once it’s all over.

Recy­cling famil­iar tropes is enjoy­able up to a point, but Freaky’s script is weak even with its sharp cast; it feels like there should be more pos­si­ble with such a twist­ed con­cept. But Lan­don and his co-writer Michael Kennedy are more inter­est­ed in quip­py lines that don’t always land and gross-out stunts than the poten­tial of the premise. It might make for a fun date night movie, but Freaky isn’t half as odd as it could be, and it’s less sat­is­fy­ing as a result.