Times have changed, but these girls haven’t
Somehow, Tina Fey keeps making “fetch” happen. Which is to say that she is now on the third iteration of one of her ur-texts, “Mean Girls.”
The much-meme’d 2004 high school comedy has not only infiltrated our lexicon — “I’m not a regular mom, I’m a cool mom,” “Get in loser, we’re going shopping,” and “On Wednesdays we wear pink” are universally understood idioms at this point — it’s spawned a Tony-nominated Broadway musical and, now, a movie musical adaptation directed by Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr.
In every version of “Mean Girls,” from screen to stage and back again, Fey has retained authorial control, writing the book of the stage musical (her husband, Jeff Richmond, composed the music with lyrics by Nell Benjamin) and the screenplay for this new musical adaptation, which arrives on screens two decades after the original film.
Fey has painstakingly preserved her most iconic lines and jokes from the original movie (see above), and while Jayne and Perez bring an energetic pizazz to the staging of the musical numbers, there’s the distinct sense that, unlike the new movie musical adaptation of “The Color Purple,” “Mean Girls” (2024) is not enough of a text to stand on its own without an understanding of “Mean Girls” (2004).
Half the experience of watching this film is waiting for the new cast members to say the lines we already know so well.
But there are also inescapable transformations in texts that get adapted to new formats and then adapted back again, especially over two decades, and some of those transformations are also culturally necessary,or dependent on other creative factors.
This “Mean Girls” is a bit of a strange text in that it is beholden to the original, and in that sense, it is unfortunately wedded to some of the more dated aspects of that film, like the fatphobia. And even though it’s right there in the title, even some of the mean-spiritedness feels a bit out of touch.
Let’s not forget that this was originally based on the 2002 social science book “Queen Bees and Wannabes” by Rosalind Wiseman. Times have changed, but “Mean Girls” hasn’t quite kept up.
In this version of “Mean Girls,” the misfit Janis, played here by former Moana herself, Auli’i Cravalho, becomes the star, simply by dint of Cravalho’s sheer star power and gorgeous singing voice, but also because the queer, artsy kids Janis and Damien (Jaquel Spivey) are so obviously cooler than everyone else. They serve as the narrators, and are so charismatic and funny they steal the show. It begs the question why anyone would even care about the attentions of queen bee Regina George in the first place.
Speaking of Regina, she’s played Reneé Rapp, who appeared in the same role on Broadway and of late has been pursuing a music career. She doesn’t have the same comedic chops as Rachel Mcadams, who iconically brought Regina to life in the first film, but Rapp’s Regina is more seductive and louche. Her powerful R&b-influenced vocals give her a pop diva quality that’s impossible to ignore but feels a bit unbalanced with the rest of the perky musical theater numbers.
While our Janis, Damien and Regina pop off the screen, the other characters are either bizarre mimics of their original counterparts or completely new takes.
Angourie Rice plays ostensible heroine Cady Heron as more of an earnest naif. She’s charming and sings well but lacks the spunk and grit that made Lindsay Lohan such a compelling and complex presence in this role. You simply can’t buy that Rice’s Cady would fall this far down the Regina rabbit hole.
There’s a lot of fun onscreen in this “Mean Girls”: great songs, and dance numbers choreographed by Kyle Hanagami. Jayne and Perez seamlessly blend the musical numbers with montage storytelling — there’s great work from both cinematographer Bill Kirstein and editor Andrew Marcus on display here — but it also feels like a condensed skim of the story and the movie’s greatest hits.
It’s more of a musical addendum to the original “Mean Girls” than it is own stand-alone project, and the fealty to the first movie kneecaps its power. Imagine what a truly contemporary remake of this could be. I guess we’ll never know.
Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes
Rating: PG-13 (sexual material, strong language, teen drinking)