VERDICT: A pleasant-enough musical reworking of the 2004 comedy, hitting the big screen on its way to becoming a slumber-party staple for decades to come.
Chirpy, as colorful as Skittles, and occasionally, appropriately, acrid, Mean Girls is a pleasantly bouncy reworking of the 2004 comedy of the same name. If that sounds like faint praise, it may be because, despite its fervent two-decades-long fan base building and enduringly quotable dialogue, the source material was perhaps always too flimsy a scaffolding to support the singing and dancing demands of a major musical.
That doesn’t mean the cast and crew behind this remake aren’t giving their all to create an energetic and entertaining extravaganza. Returning screenwriter and co-star Tina Fey, also taking producer credit this time, clearly loves this material and has assembled a team on both sides of the camera who are dedicated to the sparkle.
The story, of course, remains the same tale of teenage bite and bile: Cady (Angourie Rice, Spider-Man: No Way Home) has grown up in Kenya, home-schooled by her academic mom (Jenna Fischer). When her mother takes a position at Northwestern, the family moves to Chicago, where Cady is flung headfirst into the sink-or-swim waters of high school.
Using what she knows about the animal kingdom, Cady — with the help of new friends, outsiders Janis (Auli’i Cravalho, Darby and the Dead) and Damian (Jaquel Spivey of Broadway’s A Strange Loop, making his screen debut) — identifies her school’s “Apex Predator,” in a song of the same name.
That would be Regina George (Reneé Rapp, The Sex Lives of College Girls), of course, the beautiful and cruel leader of The Plastics, the popular clique from whom all shrink back in terror and envy. Regina draws Cady into the Plastics’ inner circle, while Janis (who was burned by Regina back in sixth grade) and Damian hope to use their new pal as an agent of chaos.
Cady isn’t sure she’s on board for this level of social battle until Regina steals her crush Aaron Samuels (Christopher Briney, The Summer I Turned Pretty), and then the gloves come off. But once Cady has a taste of the apex-predator life, will she turn permanently Plastic herself?
The stakes are low, and the tunes by Jeff Richmond (adapting his stage work) don’t elevate them all that much; the songs are plagued with the talking-singing-belting shiny sameness that has plagued musical theater at least since the rise of Pasek and Paul, and it’s up to the performers to make any of them stand out.
Luckily for Mean Girls, they’ve got Cravalho and Spivey on hand to jolt life into the material, and in their respective hands, the forgettable becomes special. (Avantika, as the bubble-headed Karen, has fun with the satirical Halloween anthem “Sexy”; when she’s not singing, however, she’s been directed to an alarmingly overdone ditziness.)
It’s hard not to think about the extraordinary 2004 cast when watching this new passel of students, but the current crop mostly defends themselves compared to the alums. Rice matches Lindsay Lohan’s everygirl energy as a wide-eyed naïf who’s just blown in from the savanna. Cady’s evolution from kind-hearted innocent to back-stabbing Eve Harrington is efficiently pointed.
Rachel McAdams’ Regina was a fresh-faced sociopath that called to mind Tuesday Weld in Pretty Poison; Rapp’s version is far vampier — the sloe-eyed actress plays her like the most fatale of femmes — but finds a new, delicious spin on the character’s villainy.
But the real MVPs here are Cravalho and Spivey, who figure out their way to steal scenes in a manner that’s equal to but quite separate from the immortal supporting turns of Lizzie Caplan and Daniel Franzese. They act as the film’s Greek chorus throughout, and in both that capacity and their roles as teen outcasts, they shine brightly and inspire the film’s heartiest laughs.
First-time feature filmmakers Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. keep a firm grip on the story, mixing diegetic music with fantasy sequences, and big dance numbers with intimate moments. With the help of cinematographer Bill Kirstein (Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus) and editor Andrew Marcus (whose musical bona fides include Hedwig and the Angry Inch and two of the best Step Up movies), Mean Girls bounces along at a brisk pace and never tilts into excess. (Unless you count the costumes by Tom Broecker, but that’s a fully intentional brand of excess.)
Mean Girls 2024 probably won’t ever displace Mean Girls 2004 in the public consciousness, but devoted fans of the latter will find enjoyment that transcends mere nostalgia from this musical remake. The original film’s more pungent observations are too often swept away in a breeze of mandated High School Musical–esque uplift, but this update never fully succumbs to the charming lie that “we’re all in this together.” Secondary education’s ambient savagery endures longer than any song.
