Family misfortunes

Actors love body-swapping roles. Character-swapping in the middle of a performance allows the players to give full vent to their talent. Think of Tom Hanks in Big, Judge Reinhold in Vice Versa or Steve Martin in All of Me.

This is Mark S Walters's remake of the 1976 movie, which starred a young Jodie Foster as a recalcitrant teenage girl who swaps personalities with her fraught mother.

While the implications of this trans-generational idea are clear (each will learn a few life lessons from the other and emerge with greater understanding), the original made a fairly dire comedy.

This version is much better, thanks largely to a sharper script and the performances of Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan. Curtis is a hyperactive control-freak widow and analyst who is about to get remarried to the nice new man in her life.

Her daughter, Anna, is a schoolgirl with a problem teacher and a nascent musical ambition, who plays guitar in a femme-fronted rock band.

When something inexplicable happens with fortune cookies that causes the switch, they inhabit each other's bodies with a great deal of commitment and humour.

This being a Walt Disney movie, Anna is about as far removed from the sex and druggery of Thirteen's teen girls as Sid Vicious is from Donny Osmond, and the "issues" are as safe as milk.

But some of the lines are really sharp: I loved her precocious brat of a brother catching Mom and husband-to-be kissing in the kitchen and exclaiming: "Get a room!"

And when teenager Curtis looks at her daughter's (as Mom) altered dress sense and complains that she looks like Stevie Nicks, Anna responds: "Who's he?"

Best of all is the climax during an otherwise predictable rock band contest at the House of Blues, when Lohan's mother-inhabited teenager fakes guitar (which she cannot play) while Curtis-as-daughter performs the crucial guitar solo in the wings. Rock on, Jamie Lee.