Millennials know Mean Girls like the backs of their hands. Not to pigeonhole Mean Girls as “millennials only” nostalgia, but the Tina Fey-penned comedy, based on Rosalind Wiseman’s high school exposé Queen Bees and Wannabes, was the teen movie of the 2000s, the one that has passed the zeitgeist test of time. It would be impossible to not compare the original and this 20-years-later remake, but even with the added bonus that this is an adaptation of the 2018 Broadway musical revamp, there’s a hollow emptiness to this rendition that’s thoroughly soul-sucking.
It’s as if by adapting the film, which was adapted from a book, into a musical and back into a movie, Fey was left utterly clueless as to why the movie she wrote two decades ago worked so well in the first place. The big arc is the same, pitching newcomer Cady Heron (Rice) and her social reject friends Damian (Spivey) and Janis (Cravalho) against Regina George (Rapp) and her Plastics. Yet to cut time to bring in musical numbers, microscenes that gave the film full-rounded characters or that mattered to the story are adjusted or scrapped. Instead, each character is given a song (or most characters are, because they removed stage Damian’s tap-dance number), but not all of those songs feed into story or character development. Like Plastic Karen (Avantika), whose song “Sexy” is based around Amanda Seyfried’s iconic delivery of, “I’m a mouse, duh,” a song that’s no more than a party anthem to remind the viewer that it’s Halloween. The Halloween party is a big turning point for Cady in the film, the one where she finally sees popular Plastic Regina for who she truly is; but instead of spending time with the two, developing Cady’s relationship to Regina, Fey’s script and Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr.’s direction opt for atmosphere over substance.
By removing interactions between characters, the film is left with no soul. Plastics Gretchen (Wood) and Karen stay sidekicks, or hyenas, as Cady coolly calls them. They become defined by the jokes made to tear them down: Karen a “dumb slut” and Gretchen a superficial wannabe. This goes against the message of the original film, which is that women have more to them below the surface and if high school didn’t pit us against each other, we would see that.
Which leads to the movie’s main problem: Regina George. Reneé Rapp is an incredibly alluring, charismatic talent that feels crushed by Jayne and Perez Jr.’s dull direction. Oddly, for a movie that builds up to a simmering third-act battle between Cady and Regina, Regina’s presence feels muted. The musical even cuts out their big blowout, the fight that leads to Regina getting hit by a bus, in service of a “fuck you” song from Janis (titled “I’d Rather Be Me”) that puts the girls’ ultimate showdown match in the background instead of the foreground. A fun song in theory, but it takes away from Cady’s personal growth by omitting her big “aha!” moment, where she finally realizes that she has become the mean girl.
There are a lot of holes that can be poked in the Mean Girls musical, but at the end of the day, it’s just a poorly made film with more product placement than heart. Cady is a boring plain-Jane type, Janis and Damian are no more than a Greek chorus, and the movie’s big bag is lacking onscreen presence. A shot-for-shot remake would have had more school spirit than this.
This article appears in January 12 • 2024.