Review: Mean Girls (2024)

Mean Girls (2024)

Rated PG-13 for strong language, sexual material, and teen drinking

Score: 3 out of 5

The new film in theaters titled Mean Girls is a movie with an identity crisis. Is it a remake? A musical? Yes. Specifically, it's an adaptation of the 2018 Broadway musical that was itself adapted from the 2004 teen comedy classic just in time for its 20th anniversary, with Tina Fey, writer of both the original film and the book for the musical, returning to not only write the screenplay for this but also reprise her role as Miss Norbury. It's a film that tries to do two things at once, both faithfully adapt the musical and offer a straightforward remake of the movie, and while it does both pretty well, it often felt at war with itself in the process, like pieces of two good movies awkwardly thrown into the same bag. Don't get me wrong, I liked this movie. The musical numbers were extremely fun, and the cast, particularly Reneé Rapp as Regina (reprising her role from Broadway) and Auli'i Cravalho as Janis, was awesome. Whether you're a fan of the original or not, I still recommend giving this a go. (It's certainly better than Mean Girls 2.) But as I watched it, whenever it wasn't focused on the musical numbers, I found myself nodding my head thinking "y'know, the original is still such a great movie."

The plot is virtually identical to the original, with no major adjustments. The beautiful but naive new girl Cady, raised in Africa (specified in this version as Kenya) by her zoologist parents, gets caught up with a clique of popular girls called the Plastics comprised of the queen bee Regina, her neurotic second-in-command Gretchen, and the airhead Karen. After Regina steals the boy she's interested in, Cady, with help from the outcasts Janis and Damian, sets out to destroy Regina's life and popularity, but turns into a bitchy brat along the way. There's more focus on social media now, there are references to Spotify, Janis is now explicitly stated to be a lesbian after it was merely implied in the original (Regina said she was, but she was presented as an unreliable narrator), and a lot of the edgier jokes from the original (including the subplot of the coach sleeping with a student) are gone, but outside the singing, this is 90% the same movie.

And that right there is the biggest problem it has. The music is the entire reason the Broadway show and, by extension, this movie exist given how closely they hew to the original film's story. And yet, this film removed about half the songs from the Broadway show's soundtrack and shortened several others, ostensibly to make the film feel less "stagey" and keep a more consistent tone. It was a decision that did not serve the film well at all, as it meant that long stretches went by with no musical numbers, leaving only a remake of a better film to stand largely on its own. It's a competent remake, don't get me wrong, albeit one that feels sanitized compared to the original. Reneé Rapp, Angourie Rice, Auli'i Cravalho, and Jaquel Spivey were all very charismatic and did great impressions of Rachel McAdams, Lindsay Lohan, Lizzy Caplan, and Daniel Franzese, while Bebe Wood added a nice touch of neuroticism to her take on Gretchen and Avantika Vandanapu had a lot of fun playing up Karen's sex appeal to make her not just an idiot, but an outright bimbo. I would not be surprised to see a lot of this movie's teenage cast go on to bigger and better things in the future, just as the stars of the original did.

But it's largely just that: impressions. There's nothing here that really adds to anything. Social media is heavily referenced and featured throughout in a way that it wasn't in the original, but in such a manner that you can tell that Tina Fey is now in her fifties. What's worse, while classic scenes and quotes are faithfully replicated, the comic timing just felt off. I laughed pretty consistently throughout, but not as much as I did watching the original. I'm not normally the kind of person who insists that every movie needs to justify its existence, but at times, this movie treads close to Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Psycho in how it approaches the source material. The trailers may have seemed almost ashamed of admitting that this was a musical, but sitting down to watch it, they turned out to be pretty indicative of how the movie itself approached its changes from the source material.

The one big difference, and the one thing that kept this movie from getting a 2 out of 5 (and honestly, it was close), was the musical numbers. While many of them have been cut, the ones they kept were still extremely enjoyable, and a lot of it came down, once again, to the cast. Rapp knows these songs like the back of her hand, and every time she got the chance to sing, it was like watching a great concert performance or music video by a pop star at the top of her game. Karen and Gretchen each only get one big musical number (not counting the Plastics' ensemble performance at the Christmas show), but Wood and Vandanapu each stole the show during them, such that I wish the film kept in more of the songs they had in the Broadway show. Cravalho and Spivey were exactly how I pictured Janis and Damian if they burst into song in the middle of the original movie, with Cravalho in particular having a very pop-punk edge to her songs while Spivey gets one of the funniest "new" songs in the film in the form of a cover of the iCarly theme song that must be seen to be believed. Unfortunately, where the music was concerned, the main weak link in the cast was a big one. Don't get me wrong, Angourie Rice is a good actress who plays Cady well when she doesn't have to sing, and in a straightforward remake of Mean Girls she would've made for a great Cady. But as much as they may have downplayed the songs, this is still a musical, and as a singer... well, she's a good actress. I would not be surprised to hear that the real reason they cut so much of the music from this musical is because they heard Rice's singing and realized that she wouldn't be able to carry a musical. Rice reminds me here of Gerard Butler in The Phantom of the Opera or Pierce Brosnan in Mamma Mia!, an otherwise talented actor who probably shouldn't do musicals.

The Bottom Line

This musical adaptation of Mean Girls exists very much in the shadow of the original film. For better or worse, the most I could say about it is that it's light, harmless fluff that doesn't overstay its welcome and whose good moments are very enjoyable. Come for some great songs, then go home and rewatch the original.