It’s super easy and generally misguided to use a new movie’s trailer against whatever movie it’s selling, even if the trailer is a rarity when it does not give away 96% of the storyline.

I mention this because the trailer for Disney’s rebooted, double-down edition of its “Freaky Friday” property, this one called “Freakier Friday” and reuniting Jamie Lee Curtis with Lindsay Lohan, is a really good trailer. It does its job. It sharpens the comic beats so that jokes and sight gags come off, well, funny.

The movie itself has a frustrating amount of trouble with that part. On the other hand: The happy ending meets your emotional needs with the promise that even an uneasily blended Los Angeles family, struggling but rich-adjacent and living a specific kind of starry, sunny existence, can iron out the kinks. And the actors work very, very hard to keep a hectic masquerade in motion.

“Freakier Friday” ups the stakes with four bodies swapped, up from the previous two. Screenwriter Jordan Weiss, working from a story credited to Weiss and initial screenwriter Elyse Hollander, revisits the characters played by Curtis and Lohan a generation later. Therapist and budding podcaster Tess (Curtis) is now grandmother to Harper (Julia Butters), the ninth-grade daughter of music industry executive and former performer Anna (Lohan).

Anna’s getting married to fancy restaurant chef Eric (Manny Jacinto), a London expat with a stridently posh daughter Lily (Sophia Hammons), who happens to be the daily nemesis of surfer-girl Harper. Zingo zango, the body-swap curse comes back for a sequel, this time scrambling the intergenerational role-play with three generations learning the ropes, with the teenagers trying to bluff their way through the confusion as women twice or three times their age and the Lohan and Curtis characters skewing suddenly much younger inside. Nothing kills the potential comedy in a storyline like this as quickly as writing a paragraph like this — but too late now.

It it fun? Almost? Kind of? Yes. Almost, and kind of. Director Nisha Ganatra jollies it along, with editor Eleanor Infante making as much rhythmic sense of the mix-ups and physical craziness as possible. But there is a strain to it all. Doubling the bodies swapped ends up feeling like six times the chaos, not two: “Cheaper by the Dozen” with a heavy side of “The Parent Trap.”

The mere existence of “Freakier Friday” exerts a strong pull of nostalgia for at least two generations, with many supporting players, from Stephen Tobolowsky (as sniveling educator Mr. Bates) to Chad Michael Murray as Anna’s old boyfriend, Jake, returning for duty. The film wouldn’t work at all, probably, and wouldn’t exist, definitely, without Curtis (who made it happen) and Lohan. They’re game for anything here, even when the shtick is forced. Yet neither performer is completely comfortable in standard-issue wackiness or what you’d call a born comedienne, the way Barbara Harris was in the 1976 film version of “Freaky Friday,” working opposite young, fiercely honest Jodie Foster.

In its commercial prospects, maybe “Freakier Friday” may be effective enough in its elaborations for this highly uncertain moment in mainstream theatergoing. I couldn’t help but wonder, though: Would there have been a way to body-swap the quality and spirit of the recent semi-flop “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” — radically different story, totally different genre, but a great mother/daughter picture, full of wit and feeling — into this serviceable contrivance’s body?

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'FREAKIER FRIDAY'

2 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG (for thematic elements, rude humor, language and some suggestive references)

Running time: 1:51

How to watch: In theaters Aug. 8

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