Annabel has your typical teenaged girls life, she’s in a band, she’s into fashion, she’s into boys and she’s constantly fighting with her younger brother. Ellen is a recently widowed Psychiatrist whom leads the ever busy and stressful life of trying to raise two kids by herself and is about to remarry and is finding that can be quite stressful in it self. The only thing mother and daughter seem to have in common is that they seem to disagree with each other on everything and think the other has the easy life. In a recent feud about Annabel wanting to skip her mother’s rehearsal dinner for the upcoming wedding to go to a once in a lifetime opportunity band audition the two almost come to blows and get into a huge fight in the middle of a Chinese restaurant. This is when the Chinese Restaurant’s meddling owner decides to give them a taste of what it would be like to walk a mile in the other’s shoes. She gives them fortune cookies that have the magical properties of switching the mind’s of the feuding pair into the other person’s body. So when they wake up Friday morning they are in for the shock of their lives as they now must each learn that many of the assumptions that they have made about each others lives are false as they are forced to pretend to be the other tell they can find a way to break the curse and restore themselves to their proper bodies.

This is a much used and sometimes to often done premise for a movie. Some magical concoction allows two people to switch bodies so they can learn valuable lessons about the person they had been previously feuding about and everyone lives happily ever after. But the shock and the surprise of the movie wasn’t the easily predictable and clichéd plot but rather the fact that the movie was both charming and funny. This was the last thing I expected the movie to be, this movie has been done so many times in the past that it would be impossible to do anything new. But the clear and simple fact is that while they did not do anything new or inventive they managed to master and old story and pull it off to be a very good movie. Jamie Lee Curtis does a masterful job of playing a pouting teenager that for the first time I ever I realized she has quite a bit of acting ability as she was simply a star in the movie. Lindsay Lohan also did a pretty good job in the movie and added a lot of the humor to the movie. The movie is no masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, but what it does become is a very charming, funny and cute movie that you can take the whole family to and laugh at the antics of such a predictable plot done in a new and masterful way.
3.5 stars out of 5