Review: Mean Girls (2024)

Directors:  Samantha Jayne, Arturo Perez, Jr.

Stars:  Auli’i Cravalho, Angourie Rice, Avantika Vandanapu

What you’re about to read isn’t going to be pretty. In fact, it’s probably going to scan like some vindictive person’s own Burn Book. The new movie adaptation of the Mean Girls stage musical (based on the first movie that was in turn based on a book) is dire. It’s toothless. It’s almost entirely charmless. And it obscenely overuses close-ups on an array of characters who seem to have been warped out of all recognition in a ker-ay-zee Gen Z funhouse mirror.

Seriously, this thing feels like it’s 50% close-ups, and they are intense, born of an unflattering urge to exaggerate material we know by heart already, in a desperate hunt for a new edge. To begin with I wondered what 20 years might have brought to Mean Girls. What the potential might be to update the material. No such attempt has been made (save for the acknowledgement that, yes, we have smartphones now). So instead, Mean Girls circa 2024 reveals what’s been degraded in popular movies.

Mark Waters’ 2004 film was pop perfection. It found its audience and then some. It achieved something incredibly rare among American high school teen comedies. The generation-defining. It’s meme’d heavily to this day. It’s cultural shorthand. And part of that alchemy was its ability to feel risky even while conforming to well-established conventions. It’s characters were zany and extra, but you could find the filament of truth within them. Even Amanda Seyfried’s ditzy Karen.

Coming off like an even-more-Republican-looking Amy Adams that you ordered from Wish, Angourie Rice is positively loathsome as Cady Heron, our double-agent heroine raised in Kenya who you’d rather see trip down a manhole than succeed. It helps little that she’s introduced in a chaotic and badly green-screened opening number – at no point during which does it look like she’s actually the one singing. Lacking even a trace of the screen presence Lindsay Lohan simply had, Rice is entirely saved by her back-up crew, joint-MVPs Auli’i Cravalho as Janis and Jaquel Spivey as Damian; genuinely the only two reasons to sit through this yassified retread.

Once we’re inevitably introduced to the Plastics, things only skew further into the uncanny valley. Reneé Rapp is an acceptable Regina George, sculpted here to look like Charlize Theron had a demon baby. She at least knows how to play to camera, particularly during the musical numbers. Her back-up worries, however. Avantika Vandanapu is a welcome addition on paper, but she seems to have been swallowed by the costume department, hair and make-up. She’s in there somewhere as bubble-headed dumbbell Karen Shetty (when given the chance to sing about being a sexy Halloween mouse she does, admittedly, eat). Scariest of all is Bebe Wood as Gretchen Wieners. I swear it feels like I’m scrawling in the Burn Book but her glare is off-putting, with eyes so dark and troubling its like getting stuck in a staring contest with Dark Willow from Buffy. I was begging these filmmakers to take it easy on all the close-ups. I’m sorry Bebe; you’re fucking terrifying.

All of which sort of undoes the magic spell of the Plastics. If they’re supposed to be the most venerated girls in all of North Shore, why do they look like crazily reanimated Bratz dolls? It feels like a mistake born from the impulse to amplify everything about the text in anticipation of an audience taking it on as pure, unadulterated nostalgia. A caricature of itself.

Twenty years is a long time. It’s a little bit frightening, actually (many of us clutched at our chests when one ad for this new movie had the gall to use the slogan “This isn’t your mother’s Mean Girls“). But it’s also not that long for a movie that has enjoyed this kind of longevity. Waters’ movie remains pretty fresh, and is revisited often. It doesn’t awkwardly lack thanks to time spent. The fatphobia is a little dated – a product of it’s time and attitudes (thanks Friends) – but Tina Fey hasn’t even updated that for this new version, so really what’s the point of this bad photocopy? It has to be the songs, right?

Well, they suck. They do! It’s been fewer than 12 hours since I got out of this movie and I couldn’t hum a single one of them, couldn’t recite any of the exceedingly clumsy lyrics for you, and I could barely differentiate one staging from another. Directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez, Jr. favour unwieldy camera moves, lots of music video wind and throwing in as many chaotic extras/dancers as they can muster, and mostly call it a day after. Where’s the ingenuity? The retooling leans into the “its a jungle out there”isms of the original flick, but this manifests awkwardly as a bunch of kids auditioning for roles in Cats. Imagine if Theater Camp had taken itself seriously. Again, Mean Girls circa 2024 manages to be scarier than most of last year’s tentpole horror movies.

The showstopping exception is Cravalho, who exits the gym after her trust falls and takes the film on a mini adventure into the realms it should have been living in all this time. The former Moana girl takes hold of this thing with a confidence and charisma that everyone else fumbles, and it even seems to inspire Jayne and Perez, Jr. into a more considered, cinematic mode. Smashing her way through a Billie Eilish-esque number, its a brief window into an alternative reality where Mean Girls 2024 isn’t just scribbling dutifully within the lines.

But mostly, alas, it does just that. It’s nice having Tina Fey and Tim Meadows back as the teachers, but its also weird that their relationship has developed but this isn’t the same timeline. Ashley Park and Jon Hamm are criminally underused as misc. faculty members. Both have less than a minute on screen. Hamm does, however, deliver this movie’s best new joke in his precious 30 seconds of buffoonery. So there’s that. But overall this just feels like a wildly unnecessary rehash because the songs and the cast just aren’t up to it, and the waft of desperation is anything but Fetch.

It’s still better than Mean Girls 2 though.