The Daily Telegraph - Features
Gen Z gets a fresh new twist on a high-school classic
Mean Girls
12A cert, 112 min ★★★★★ Dir Samantha Jayne,
Arturo Perez Jr
Starring Angourie Rice, Reneé Rapp, Bebe Wood, Avantika Vandanapu, Auli’i Cravalho, Jacquel Spivey, Christopher Briney, Jenna Ficher, Busy Philipps, Tim Meadows, Tina Fey Empires wax and wane; states cleave asunder and coalesce; but teenagers being horrid little twerps is eternal. Twenty years ago, the original Mean Girls pinned down a new millennial strain of adolescent narcissism and pettiness, and because of that – as well as the fact it was very funny – it soon became one of the definitive high-school comedies of the age.
Guess what? Its story of vying classroom cliques translates perfectly to the Gen-Z era, with only the gentlest of updates. Now rumours don’t just circulate but go viral on TikTok, identity isn’t just a social consideration but an existential one, while victimhood confers its own kind of weird moral status.
In the 2004 version, Lindsay Lohan’s international transfer student Cady Heron wryly informs us that Halloween is “the one night of the year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it”. But in 2024, before Angourie Rice’s version of the character can get so much as a word in, Avantika Vandanapu’s Karen Shetty – one of the fearsome alpha girls known as the Plastics – quickly scolds: “Cady, if you don’t dress slutty, that’s slut-shaming us.” In other words, even when it comes to basic wisdom about appropriate clothing, nobody has learned anything. Or if they did, they also quickly worked out how to get around it.
In which case, why remake Mean Girls at all? Because, as its entire publicity campaign has strenuously tried to conceal, this new version is actually a musical. A stage adaptation – written, like the original, by Tina Fey – opened on Broadway in 2017, and this is a screen version of that production, shot for the most part like a conventional high-school movie but with regular detours into pop-video make-believe.
While you don’t have to be doused in Mean Girls lore to enjoy it, it carries itself like a sing-along tribute, with every classic gag delivered like an applause line and every key scene overplayed with lip-smacking relish. When the queen bee Regina George (Reneé Rapp) is first introduced, the world doesn’t simply go into flattering slow motion: the canteen lights snap off and she struts in, Christina Aguilera style, purring “My name is Regina George, and I am a massive deal”.
The film is a complete scream for three main reasons. First, the generational rewrite has been deftly done, with enough timeliness braided in to make it feel freshly relevant, but all the gags fans want to hear left reverently intact. Second, the new cast are uniformly excellent, from the three energetically hilarious new Plastics (Rapp, Vandanapu and Bebe Wood), to Moana’s Auli’i Cravalho and Jacquel Spivey as the contented outcasts who coach Rice’s Cady to infiltrate the school’s ultimate in-group.
And third, Jeff Richmond and Nell Benjamin’s suite of songs, which draw amusingly on all sorts of noughties pop trends while delighting in their own right. “Regina! Regina! Regina!” everyone elatedly trills in Revenge Party, and even if we should know better by now, her reign will endure.
In cinemas from Wed