Back in 2018, Netflix’s The Princess Switch was one of the best gifts of the corny holiday TV romance season. It featured no less than two Vanessa Hudgenses: one a Chicago-born baker named Stacy who comes to the fictional country of Belgravia with her coworker Kevin (Nick Sagar) to compete in a baking contest and the other Margaret, a publicity-shy princess of Montenaro engaged to Belgravia’s prince Edward (Sam Palladio). The women switch places, fall for the men in each other’s lives and live happily ever after. Or so they did until the sequel, The Princess Switch: Switched Again hit Netflix today.
This time, Stacy and Edward–now royally married–return to Montenaro for Margaret’s coronation after she unexpectedly becomes next in line for the throne. Though Margaret and Kevin broke up months earlier, the embers of their relationship flicker back to life when Stacy convinces Kevin and his precocious daughter Olivia (Alexa Adeosun) to attend the coronation too. Add to that a third Hudgens doppelgänger named Fiona, a cousin of Margaret’s who will stop at nothing to steal some royal dough to fund her social media influencer lifestyle, and the movie is ripe for screwball hijinks. Unfortunately, those hijinks aren’t quite as fun as they were in the first movie.
The Princess Switch: Switched Again is narratively convoluted to say the least. Margaret’s crowning is the engine that drives the whole story and the romance plots are the film’s emotional core, but all of those elements sort of take a back seat to the screwball shell game of switching around which Vanessa Hudgens goes where. The reason for Margaret and Stacy to switch again is simple enough (Kevin and Margaret need time to talk uninterrupted by the former’s queenly duties), but it’s how writers Robin Bernheim and Megan Metzger get Fiona involved that elevates the film to camp.
It’s hard to talk about those plot machinations without spoiling some of the movie’s more absurd–and enjoyable–choices, but it’s worth noting that Switched Again does tend to plod along until the switching starts around the halfway mark. Bernheim and Metzger certainly attempt to create some dramatic tension by giving Margaret another possible love interest in her advisor Antonio (Lachlan Nieboer), but he’s such a plot device that he never feels like a legitimate rival to Kevin. Likewise, the decision to leave Edward in the dark about Margaret and Stacy’s switch feels entirely unjustified and leads to some of the film’s worst scenes, as Olivia redefines the idea of an obnoxious movie child by giving Edward the worst possible marriage advice while trying to keep him from discovering the switch. Rather, it’s not until Fiona swans in to wreak havoc that the film actually becomes any fun.
To her credit, does commendable work differentiating her three characters. In the first film, she did surprisingly well at switching off and on the chemistry with Palladio and Sagar depending on which character she was playing in a given scene and her accent work and body language were just believable enough to make Margaret and Stacy feel different. She does the same here, but with the added bonus of doing what feels like a bizarre Eartha Kitt impression as Fiona. With her deeper voice, cheap accent and an increasingly absurd series of fascinators, Fiona is villain you love to hate Hudgens is clearly having a blast playing her—particularly in the scenes where Fiona struggles to project a royal dignity she doesn’t actually possess.
Still, surprisingly good as Hudgens is in Switched Again, she’s no Meryl Streep. She’s not even a Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap. Hudgens is always working so hard to keep the characters distinct that the viewer is constantly aware of the the effort and the whole film feels like an elaborate acting showcase with no real emotional or narrative weight for the audience to invest in otherwise. Admittedly, nobody is coming to this film looking for a moving character drama, but the first film managed to balance its absurd premise with enough character work to make us care. Here, everyone is just a piece in a plot puzzle in a way that saps the fun out of the proceedings and it’s a shame, because there are signs that it didn’t have to be this way.
Near the film’s end, there’s a moment when Stacy and Edward finally get a break from all the doppelgänger hijinks to talk about their relationship issues. It’s a sweet scene that reminds the viewer just how much chemistry Palladio and Hudgens share and it feels like a glimpse of the different–possibly better–movie that could have been. Sure, the whole appeal of The Princess Switch: Switched Again is testing how many Vanessa Hudgens you can fit in single a movie before it becomes a Christmas-themed Orphan Black knockoff, but if this sequel proves anything, it’s that we should learn to appreciate the Vanessa Hudgens we already have.
