YMMV / The Parent Trap (1998)

• Adaptation Displacement: Like the original 1961 film, viewers aren't aware this film was based on a novel, Lottie and Lisa. Some don't even know it's a remake.
• Adorkable:
  • Elizabeth when she's drunk. Putting her foot in Martin's hand, slurring her words and bumping into everything...capping it off with giving Nick a sheepish wave when he sees her from the elevator. Then there's that loud burp she gives when she drinks the Hideous Hangover Cure. You wouldn't expect classically trained Natasha Richardson to be so delightfully dorky, would you?
  • Hallie can actually be quite dorky and adorable when pretending to be Annie. She's a spunky California girl attempting to pass as a proper English Rose, and this results in adorkable hilarity whenever she slips California slang in that posh accent. Then there's her falling off her chair while trying to read a fax in Martin's hand, and trying to blame it on drinking too much wine (she's eleven and had one sip).
    "Just a touch woozy, that's all."
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • The "11 years and 9 months later" caption gives the implication that Elizabeth got pregnant very quickly after meeting Nick - suggesting that may have been the reason they got married in the first place.
  • Did the twins actually want to get their parents back together at first? It seems as though they just want to arrange things so they meet again and at least get to be involved in their children's lives. Right before they separate, Annie is told that she's to find out why their parents split up, suggesting that the twins might just want to find out if they still have feelings for each other before forcing them together.
• Angst? What Angst?: Downplayed. When both girls discover they're separated twins, they never seem to hold any outright anger towards their parents for keeping them apart (Hallie does say to her mother "no offense, but this arrangement totally sucks") and merely want to get to know their respective parent better. However, Hallie in particular seems to have real discipline issues - being very combative with Annie when they first meet - implying she has been affected emotionally by not knowing her mother.
• Award Snub: While Lindsay Lohan got other awards recognitions for her dual performance, she didn't get recognized at either the Academy Awards or Golden Globes though. She also didn't get an MTV Movie Award nomination for Breakthrough Performance at all either. Same with Best Fight for the fencing scene or Best On-Screen Duo too (which she also could've logically shared both with her double Erin Mackey as well since her part in the illusion was incredibly invaluable).
• Awesome Music: Overall, this movie got the rights to some fantastic music (we have no idea how):
  • "L O V E" by Nat King Cole—always the classic it is—opens the film during the Nick and Elizabeth on the Queen Elizabeth 2 montage.
  • "Soulful Strut" by Young-Holt Unlimited—the instrumental remake of "Am I the Same Girl" by Barbara Acklin, which perfectly fits in as the music used for Annie and Martin's special handshake/dance (see Fridge for an even more appropriate connection too).
  • "There She Goes" by The La's, played when Hallie arrives in London and gets the obligatory landmark tour.
  • "Do You Believe in Magic" by The Lovin' Spoonful, while the twins are coaching each other in preparation for making the switch.
  • "In the Mood" by the Glenn Miller Band, during the farcical scene where everyone is running around the hotel just missing each other.
  • "Every Time We Say Goodbye" by Ray Charles, when Elizabeth and Annie fly back to London.
  • "This Will Be (An Everlasting Love)" by Natalie Cole, over the end-credits photo montage.
  • And, of course, both the film's main suite and composition, scored by the always incomparable Alan Silvestri.
• Broken Base:
  • Viewers are split over the twins' plan. Numerous parodies and deconstructions find it unrealistic and that the majority of divorced couples don't usually get back together. On the other hand, some fans point out that some do get back together and the movie leaves plenty of Foreshadowing that the parents still feel something for each other.
  • There are some people who feel sorry for Meredith, despite her intentions. This extends to the twins' final revenge, placing Meredith's mattress in the middle of the lake while she's fast asleep after taking a sleeping pill - something that could easily result in her drowning. Some see it as going too far, while others view it as adequate comeuppance for Meredith.
• Common Knowledge:
  • A lot of fans forget that the twins' plan isn't initially to get their parents back together. They just want to get to know the respective parent they've never lived with. The plan also doesn't come into action until after the twins have a discussion about how neither of their parents ever came close to getting married again. So the twins are aware from the start that there's a possibility they wouldn't get back together.
  • Meredith is assumed to be unable to swim, based off the final prank on her. Except after said prank, she swims back to shore quite easily, and there is mention of her and Nick swimming together. It would also be a little uncharacteristically cruel for Hallie and Annie to float Meredith out in the middle of a lake knowing she won't be able to make it back.
• Designated Hero:
  • The parents. They were people who got divorced quickly and for no adequately explained reason and, to make it easier on themselves, decided that each would only get custody of one child and never mention the existence of their sibling. Robot Chicken demonstrated the couple's despicable behavior in a fake trailer for a midquel.
  • Hallie and Annie essentially manipulate their parents into getting back together through dishonest means, as well as torment their father’s fiancée for both being greedy and getting in the way of them reuniting their parents. Earlier on in the movie, Hallie does instigate conflicts with Annie, but Annie does call her out on it to a certain extent.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: Although the last prank on Annie's cabin results in both twins getting punished severely, one can't deny that the booby traps are extremely cool, and the Disaster Dominoes are hilarious.
• Draco in Leather Pants: The Villain Was Right podcast and many other fans view Meredith in a much more sympathetic light, claiming that she was merely an obstacle to the parents getting together. People also feel she didn't deserve the last prank the twins pull on her. However, this ignores that she's up front about marrying Nick for his money, gloats about separating father and daughter by sending her off to a boarding school, and threatens her fiance's 11-year-old daughter into keeping quiet.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Martin and Chessy are beloved. Both of them provide the majority of the film's funny moments.
  • Both the unnamed boy who didn't mean to come to a girls’ camp but befriends the girls and Hallie's friend Nicole (the Pint-Sized Powerhouse with tie-dyed t-shirts) disappear after the camping scenes in the first act. Nonetheless, both are extremely popular supporting characters.
• Fanon: Some fans like the idea of Vicki in the remake actually being the same Vicki from the original, as a way of tying the two films together (they're both played by Joanna Barnes). The fact that she's aware of Meredith marrying Nick for his money lends some merit to the notion. Meredith even wears a similar charm bracelet to Vicki (which Elaine Hendrix says is a Shout-Out).
• Fetish Retardant: The appearance of the butler wearing a Speedo. He's not fat or ugly, but for some Americans where the standard male swimming trunk is knee-length, there's something uncomfortable about a full-grown adult (and fairly hairy) man in a bathing suit comparable in coverage (and translucency) with the younger-generation girl's bikini bottom.
• Genius Bonus: The fact that Hallie and Annie share a love for Oreos with peanut butter is more than just a funny quirk they happen to share, like their love of poker. Many twin studies have shown that identical twins perceive certain genetically-predisposed flavors in the same way.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • On the red carpet for this film, the then-twelve-year-old Lindsay Lohan was asked about doing more movies. She responded that she might in the future, but she wanted to have a normal childhood for a while. At the time, a relief that she wouldn't become a Former Child Star. Later, she fell headlong into the trap and is one of the most famous examples of her generation.
  • Hallie-as-Annie asks for a sip of wine (and it's implied that she's done vino taste testing before- she grew up on a vineyard after all) at one point. This scene became a lot harder to watch after Lindsay Lohan's very public struggle with alcoholism.
  • Hallie mockingly says of Annie's nose "don't worry, dear; those things can be fixed". Lindsay Lohan would later get a bit of plastic surgery herself in real life.
  • Hallie being a Daddy's Girl, when Lindsay Lohan was rather publicly estranged from her father during the worst parts of her bad years.
  • The film's plot of the twins reuniting their divorced parents becomes bitterly ironic after Dina and Michael Lohan's divorce and Michael's subsequent ill-fated marriage to Kate Major.
  • There's Elizabeth's Anguished Declaration of Love, where she mentions her and Nick growing old together and asks if he expects to live happily ever after? It can sting with the knowledge that her actress Natasha Richardson would die suddenly and tragically in a skiing accident just ten years later - meaning she and her husband (Liam Neeson, who still hasn't remarried) never got to grow old together, and she never saw her children grow up. In fact, Elizabeth's proper introduction scene has her hugging one of her children, the latter in tears because "I've missed you so much" - which feels even more bittersweetly poignant.
  • The comedy scene of both twins being appalled at their mother's drunkenness in San Francisco, and Hallie making a joke about heading into her teenage years "and I'll be the only girl I know without a mother to fight with" are especially harsh when you think of Lindsay Lohan getting brought to nightclubs by her mother in real life and partying with her while she was underage, and said mother using her daughter's own troubles to launch a reality show, respectively.
  • Hallie and Nick use the Concorde to get to London before Annie and Elizabeth. Two years later, Concorde had its first and only devastating crash due to an issue with its specialized tires, killing 109 people. This was one in a number of factors that eventually grounded the Concorde line for good by 2003.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Dennis Quaid plays a divorced father whose kids want him to get back with his wife. Seven years later, Quaid would star in the 2005 remake of Yours, Mine, and Ours, where he plays a widowed Coast Guard with 8 kids who marries a widowed handbag designer (Rene Russo) with 10 kids. But the kids' goal in that film is the total opposite of the twins' goal; they want the parents to split up!
  • When Lohan and Richardson are crossing the street "Abbey Road" style, parked nearby is a white, classic VW Beetle. Lohan later starred in Herbie: Fully Loaded.
  • While Annie pieces together the signs that she and Hallie are sisters, Annie comments, "This is so freaky." And in Freaky Friday, the character who ends up in Lindsay's body nearly gets caught out by being too well-spoken and quickly covers up by saying 'like' a lot - just as Annie does.
  • In the film, Dennis Quaid's character plays a middle-aged man marrying a woman in her 20s. In 2020, Quaid courted controversy by marrying a woman 39 years his junior.
  • The Les Yay below when Lohan later went public with her relationship with DJ/musician Samantha Ronson in the late 2000s.
  • Natasha Richardson would later play a Meredith-like Rich Bitch who's also the Romantic False Lead in Maid in Manhattan.
  • Meredith notes she "hates things that crawl", referring to the lizard the girls prank her with, on top of not being a nature person. Elaine Hendrix has since become a well-known animal rights activist.
  • The fact that the twins' love of Oreos with peanut butter is considered disgusting by most others is hysterical in light of the fact that Peanut Butter Flavor Oreos exist now, along with many stranger flavors.
• Karmic Overkill: Meredith embodies almost all the tropes of children's movie villains: she is a Gold Digger, Child Hater and a potential Wicked Stepmother. However, a part of the viewers feel that Hallie and Annie crossed the line with their last prank on her: they pushed her mattress to float in the lake while she was asleep. She could very well have drowned. This is presumably why when the girls are next seen, they say they're being "punished until the end of the century".
• Les Yay: Between Hallie and the Tie-Dye Girl ("Nicole", as the script names her). Hallie comments on her being "my kind of woman" and in a later scene, Nicole piggybacks Hallie as they walk back to their lodge and even calls her "babe".
• Love to Hate: Elaine Hendrix makes Meredith so brilliantly evil that she's among the favorite characters in the movie. Amusingly, Hendrix is well aware of this and appears to revel in it.
• Nightmare Fuel: To complete her disguise as Hallie, Annie is forced to have her ears pierced. The girls resort to a massively long needle and a piece of apple to carry out the crude technique, as we see all of it. Annie's squirming and subsequent scream don't help matters at all. Not too surprisingly, this bit is often edited out when aired.
• No Yay: Annie and Hallie's mutual eagerness to see the other skinny-dip for losing the poker game is disturbing, due to them being little girls and identical twin sisters (though to be fair, neither knew the latter at that point). Maybe due to Naked People Are Funny, since they're only eleven, but the catcalls suggest otherwise.
• One-Scene Wonder: Joanna Barnes, who played the evil girlfriend in the original, has a small role as Meredith's mother (also named Vicki). In her first scene, she ensures you remember her with this hilariously condescending exchange to Annie-as-Hallie.
  Vicki: Hello, pet! You may call me 'Aunt Vicki'.
  Annie raises her eyebrows to say You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!.
• Retroactive Recognition: Kat Graham was one of Annie's camp friends before becoming Bonnie Bennett in The Vampire Diaries. She somehow looks close to Lindsay Lohan's age despite being three years younger.
• Signature Scene: One of the most remembered scenes is when Elizabeth arrives drunk at the Stafford Hotel and runs into Nick in the elevator.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The movie gets dated to the '90s in a couple of ways:
  • Hallie has a poster of Leonardo DiCaprio at a time when he was best known as a teen heartthrob from the movie Titanic, and before he was known for his more mature roles in The Departed, Blood Diamond, Django Unchained, and The Wolf of Wall Street.
  • At the end of the movie, Hallie and Nick use the Concorde, which was withdrawn from service in 2003, to reach London before Annie and Elizabeth.
  • Meredith is the only one shown using a cell phone while the other characters communicate entirely over the landline (Elizabeth even doing business calls from it), and it's a late '90s Nokia model.
    • Two girls complain that their phones have no reception at camp. These days, it's hard to imagine such a place, regularly frequented by humans, not having coverage.
  • The Photo Montage at the end dates the movie to its release date of 1998, by writing the year on the first picture's folder.
• Values Dissonance:
  • The idea that parents who broke up in a divorce should get back together, no matter how much they fight, is odd to 21st-century society (but quite familiar to mid-20th century American one). The remake seems to recognize this, as while the relationship between the parents in the Hayley Mills version seems a little abusive by modern standards, in the remake, the parents never actually fought, and both make mentions of having stupid tempers when they were younger. It's mentioned that the main reason for the divorce was "we were both young, we both had stupid tempers" as well as Elizabeth technically not wanting to leave — she expected Nick to stop her so they could make up, but Nick believed she wanted to leave. Now that they've matured and sorted their issues out, they might fare better.^note  It's interesting that the original book (and its 1950 German adaptation) is closer to the remake than to 1961 adaptation in this regard - as in, the narrator and the mother explicitly acknowledge that it is better to be divorced than to live in a loveless marriage, and the main reason for the break-up was the father's issue of combining his musical career and child-rearing, which had been pretty much resolved by the time the twins met each other again.
    • Nick mentions Elizabeth threw a hair dryer at him on the day she left while they were fighting. It's seen more as an amusing little anecdote, although today more people would see it as abusive behavior no matter what the gender of the partner was doing it to the other.
  • The custody agreement, which comes off as weird even in the original version, seems even more so in the remake, which is set in the '90s. The idea that modern parents would think it acceptable to separate twins and then proceed to lie by omission for the next ten years is unconscionable; the idea that they would be totally fine with never having contact with their non-custodial twin and letting that child think they abandoned her is even worse. There's no mention of a court agreement in the remake, which is just as well since no judge would have ever agreed to that custody arrangement.
  • One of the twins casually uses the word "gypped" at one point, a slur that comes from the word Gypsy which has since fallen completely out of fashion to use and is now seen as racist as using the phrase "Jewed" to describe being swindled or cheated out of something.
• The Woobie: Annie goes through rather a lot in this film, far more than her sister. In addition to the angst about never knowing her father, her time at Camp Walden sees her being humiliated multiple times by the bratty Hallie - including presumably having to walk back to her bunk soaking wet and naked. She only does one thing in retaliation for Hallie's pranks, and it results in her entire cabin being vandalized. Not to mention she has to do the most for the transformation - having her hair cut and ears pierced (which she is visibly terrified during). And once she arrives in Napa, she gets just one car ride with her father before suddenly having to deal with his relationship drama (that Hallie initially refuses to help with). Meredith also threatens her personally.

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