Get out the Burn Book. I have shit to say.
Ok, here’s the thing. I fully understand that Mean Girls (2024) is an adaptation of the Broadway musical of the same name and not meant to be a remake of the original movie – check out my review, here – but regardless, liking this movie was always going to be an uphill battle for me. I’ve never seen the stage show so I had no idea what to expect in terms of the songs or changes made from the original movie to the stage. However, I knew I could expect recreations of iconic scenes and lines and as pessimistic as it may sound, accepted the inevitable disappointment of said recreations. This version of Mean Girls certainly doesn’t deserve to be cheated on every Thursday in the projection room above the auditorium, but it also can’t sit with us. Fetch, it is not.
Based on the Broadway musical (which in turn is based on the 2004 movie of the same name), Mean Girls tells the story of Cady Heron, a previously home-schooled teenager who begins a new school year in a typical American high school for the first time ever. There she meets the Plastics, a clique of popular girls who rule their school with their cruelty and sneaky tactics. When they unexpectedly befriend Cady she gets drawn into their world of backstabbing and betrayal and gets a firsthand lesson in being a mean girl.
Simply put, this is not a real movie. It’s clear to see how fun this show would be in the setting of live theatre, but this big screen adaptation lacks any theatricality of the production it’s based on or the charm and emotional heft that Mean Girls (2004) had. Honestly, Ariana Grande’s “Thank U, Next” music video has more theatricality and cinematic awe than this. This big budget movie is the one that looks and feels more like a music video. At times it even gives the same energy as an uneven episode of Glee (2009 – 2015). It’s baffling. The filmmakers had all the resources and freedom that a film budget and set allow and yet the movie fails to elevate the material into anything resembling spectacle. It’s as if they were working with the constraints of live theatre.
The musical numbers have no fanfare and the performances feel inorganic even for a musical. There isn’t anything sensational about them and they’re all staged / choreographed in the same boring way. The severe lack of interesting or dynamic choreography is shocking. Many of the musical numbers are simply the actors sitting, then standing, then sitting again. Furthermore, let it be known that running does not count as choreography. I’m probably being particularly hard on this movie because I recently saw The Color Purple (2023) – another movie based on a musical based on a movie based on a book FYI – and was blown away by its epicness. Yes, these stories couldn’t be more different in tone and subject matter but the level of show-stopping excellence and performance The Color Purple delivered is what I’m looking for in a movie musical. It delivered and Mean Girls did not.
The modernity of the setting, the hollow line reading of iconic quotes, the uninspired wardrobe….this movie musical has all the razzle dazzle of a middle school production. It’s just so…2024. The present-day slang, styling and trends are more of a hindrance to Mean Girls rather than a fun new twist. Part of the appeal of the Plastics, their world, their aesthetic and vernacular is how 2000s it is. This movie would have been much more playful and enjoyable if it had been set in the 2000s. Watching the Plastics do everything from make TikToks, to recommend Spotify threads, to perform musical numbers on Instagram Live is borderline soul-shattering. Watching this version of Mean Girls is like watching a TikTok meme’d recap of the original movie. If audiences wanted to do that, they’d do so on TikTok or YouTube. Let movies be MOVIES! Modern filmmakers, you don’t need to include your characters being on social media as a filmmaking technique! It’s ok, I promise! It always looks cheap and will ultimately be super dated. Which doesn’t make a movie timeless (as good ones are). It makes it like the rest of internet content: funny for a short time than forgettable and cringey. About as cringey as the GLARING product placement.
Returning cast members Tina Fey and Tim Meadows are expectedly wonderful. They step back into their characters with ease, delivering lines both classic and new with just as much impact as 20 years ago. Whether it’s Jurassic World: Dominion (2022) or Hocus Pocus 2 (2022) the result is always the same: the legacy characters flawlessly perform their iconic characters as though no time has passed and no one really cares about the new characters. By the way, check out my reviews for those movies, here and here. Those two made me laugh the most, hands down!
The new cast is much more of a let down. It’s as though they’re hoping our knowledge of these beloved characters makes up for their lack of crafting a well-rounded portrayal. Often famous lines are repeated with a disappointing blandness, with the cast clearly hoping that just repeating these quotes is enough to make people laugh as they did once before. However, the cast doesn’t understand why these lines are funny or smart. They’re just parroting them back. Then again would repeating the lines exactly the same way necessarily be a good thing? That might have been more embarrassing. Mean Girls recreates the same scenes as the original movie, obviously, but thankfully not the exact same jokes and comedic beats. A lot of the jokes either have updated punchlines or completely new ones which is cool to see and truthfully, a lot of the new lines made me laugh.
A lacklustre adaptation that never meets the high bar set by its source material, Mean Girls is not as grool as I had hoped it would be. There are some new story and character updates that will delight and surprise but anything that you loved about the original movie is not nearly as well-handled as the first time around. You know what? At the very least this is MUCH better than the terrible made-for-TV standalone sequel Mean Girls 2 (2011). Yikes.
Will you see Mean Girls?
Let me know in the comments or on social media!
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