Mean Girls review

MEAN GIRLS: 

MUSICAL REMAKE HITS THE SAME NOTES AS 2004 ORIGINAL! 

By Nico Beland

Movie Review: ** ½ out of 4

PARAMOUNT PICTURES

Avantika, Angourie Rice, Reneé Rapp, Bebe Wood, Auliʻi Cravalho, Jaquel Spivey, Christopher Briney, Tim Meadows, and Tina Fey in Mean Girls (2024)

 

            The Plastics are back in this all-new musical update on the 2004 teen comedy classic, Mean Girls. I’ll go on record and say the original Mean Girls is one of the funniest comedies of the 2000s with brilliant storytelling, memorable characters, and an incredibly hilarious script written by Tina Fey. 

            Mean Girls wasn’t just a movie, it was a phenomenon as it was a huge hit from critics and audiences, is constantly quoted and referenced even today, and even spawned a live stage musical of the same name. Well, just like last year’s Color Purple, I guess it was only a matter of time before Mean Girls got the musical movie treatment with Tina Frey (30 Rock, Date Night, Sisters) and Tim Meadows (Wayne’s World 2, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,Dream Scenario) reprising their roles as Ms. Norbury and Principal Duvall and features a whole new cast of students portraying the iconic characters. 

            So, after a bunch of hype I can say that the musical movie version of Mean Girls is…perfectly fine! It’s hard to really call this movie bad because it is a well-made movie, the musical numbers are bursting with life and energy, and the performances by the cast are very strong, but if you’ve seen the original movie before then you already know how everything is going to play out by the end and the film doesn’t really try to surprise its audience. 

            The film follows Cady Heron (Angourie Rice-Spider-Man franchise, Mare of Easttown, The Last Thing He Told Me; who was originally portrayed by Lindsay Lohan in the original), a young girl who has just moved from Africa and is starting her first day of high school. There, she befriends two outcasts known as Janis (Auliʻi Cravalho (Moana, Rise, Darby and the Dead) and Damien (Jaquel Spivey-A Strange Loop) and learns about the infamous trio of girls known as The Plastics led by the queen bee herself, Regina George (Reneé Rapp-The Sex Lives of College Girls; who also portrayed Regina in the stage musical and was originally played by Rachel McAdams in the 2004 film). 

            At first, Cady seems to enjoy hanging out with The Plastics, but when she catches Regina making out with a boy Cady likes named Aaron Samuels (Christopher Briney-The Summer I Turned Pretty), she, Janis, and Damien hatch a plan to get back at Regina and take The Plastics down for good. Oh, they also sing songs in this! 

            The film also stars Avantika (Spin, Boomika, Horrorscope) as Karen Shetty AKA Karen Smith; who was originally portrayed by Amanda Seyfried, Bebe Wood (The New Normal, The Real O’Neals, Love, Victor) as Gretchen Wieners; who was originally portrayed by Lacey Chabert, Jenna Fischer (The Office, Blades of Glory, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story) as Ms. Heron, and Busy Phillips (Dawson’s Creek, Cougar Town, The Gift) as Mrs. George; who was originally portrayed by Amy Poehler in the 2004 film. 

            Overall, Mean Girls (2024) is an almost line-for-line remake of the original movie that doesn’t really do much new with the material aside from making it a musical and anyone who’s seen the 2004 Mean Girls will see everything coming from a mile away. Normally, I would rip a movie like this apart for being lazy or uninspired (Just look at my 2019 Lion King review for more), but there are two elements that make me forgive the word-for-word script a little more. 

            First being the cast’s performances, everybody does a solid job portraying their characters and breathing new life into them. Angourie Rice isn’t rehashing what Lindsay Lohan did, Reneé Rapp is not rehashing what Rachel McAdams already did, they’re the same characters but different interpretations of them and it looks like the cast in general had a lot of fun working on this. 

            The other reason being musical numbers which alone make the movie worth watching because of all the energy and passion put into them. They’re very well-choreographed, the songs themselves are catchy, and the singing is phenomenal so even if I didn’t fully love this new Mean Girls, the musical numbers in it I certainly did. 

            The movie does a lot of the same jokes as in the original and scenes are ripped straight from it. I didn’t find the recycled jokes from the original to be very funny here because I already saw them in the first movie and it did them way better, but there were two jokes that I found incredibly funny. 

            The first being a lyric in a musical sequence where Karen sings about Sex Cancer which was followed by an exchange by Gretchen that was very funny and a moment where Tina Fey’s Ms. Norbury sounds like she’s about to break into song, but immediately changes her mind which was probably the funniest bit in the film. With that said, I at least got a few chuckles here and there and even when a joke didn’t quite work, I still found it cute. 

            The inclusion of modern talk and technology felt extremely forced and ironically dated whereas the way the original’s themes and ideas were presented, they felt a lot more timeless and relatable because they weren’t trying to fill it with Snapchat, Instagram, hashtags, etc. Just goes to show that it was done better in 2004 and this one will likely fade into obscurity. 

            This review for Mean Girls feels all over the place, but that’s also because my thoughts on the film itself were all over the place. It’s not a bad movie and is worth checking out just for the performances and song sequences, but if you’re looking for a teen comedy that has a clever premise, a great sense of humor, and memorable characters I’d recommend going back 20 years. 

            It may not be Fetch, but it’s a lot better than movie remake equivalents of getting hit by a bus.