I’ve gotten to the point where I know I’m old when they are doing remakes of movies I saw as a tax-paying adult. Mean Girls came out in Two Thousand and Four y’all. The story of Cady, the new girl who is homeschooled by her academic parent in Kenya into the dangerous world of middle-class suburban high school, is old enough to have girls who saw it in high school to be women with daughters in high school. Life is wild, y’all. The world changed in the years in between, and Mean Girls became a successful Broadway Musical. And since it’s been successful in another style, it’s time to take that version and make it into a film. Now, we have Mean Girls again in 2024. Angourie Rice (Betty Brant in the MCU Spidey movies) plays Cady Heron, Reneé Rapp plays Regina George, and Auliʻi Cravalho plays Janis ‘Imi’ike. I focus on these three because this is the core relationship of the story and always has been.
Just in case you’ve never seen Mean Girls, it’s about Cady coming to town and being the new girl in school. She’s befriended by Janis and her friend Damian as she doesn’t fit in but is warned to stay away from Regina George and her crew, The Plastics, the top girls clique in the school. From there, Cady becomes a rival to Regina in the school as a way of revenge for Janis and Cady, and in the end, lessons are learned, and everyone are friends – in the 2004 version. Written again by Tina Fey with Composer Jeff Richmond and lyricist Nell Benjamin on the songbook of the film, I feel the change to a musical does work. Rapp instantly gathers all your attention on the screen when she appears. She feels utterly different than McAdams did in the older film. This Regina actually does feel like a queen and not just a stuck-up, spoiled teenage girl. She feels like these reimagined versions of Disney villains; she feels more like Angelina Jolie’s Maleficent than just a big bully. There’s a different heart in the character that I think comes from the many reexaminations of the characters over the years since the first film came out.
And boy, can Rapp sing. I was legitimately impressed by what I saw and heard. I can say that for most of the songs. They skew nicely into the modern pop sound mold, nice dance grooves, and solid arrangements of the music and vocals. Rice’s Cady feels much more naïve than the earlier version than what feels like a heroic character that loses her way in the older film. This Cady is much more malleable to those around her from the two friend groups and her desires. She does feel like she has a bit less agency in this version. Now Janis, I think, is one of the more evolved changes to her. Janis is now actually gay rather than being mad about being thought of as being gay, as it’s a bad thing. It’s more about being forced outed, along with the whole “she’s obsessed” thing Regina does in the first version. For me, this makes complicates her character more than before. For me, as time’s gone on, Janis is clearly the same as Regina, as they both are drawn to Cady to control her for their own means. This version, though, I feel ends up being the actual real antagonist of the film that never ever is forced to take accountability for what she’s done. I say this because Regina in this film does have her bully part but is also not completely terrible because she has no outlet for her emotions and is seemingly trapped in her “pretty girl” box. This Regina actually feels more mature than the rest of the adults in her life and is stuck around these people—more of a big fish in a small pond.
Jaquel Spivey is a treat in this film; their performance is a delight and completely subsumes the old version of the character of Damian for me. His line delivery and comic timing is perfect. Bebe Wood, who plays Gretchen Wieners, is really sweet in here, and the new version of the character feels way more empathetic than the Lacey Chabert one from the past. Avantika, who plays Karen Shetty, is funny as the cute “dumb” one who is always there for comic relief but has a great dance number in the Halloween party scene. The full cast does great here in how the musical nature of the story is handled. The musical parts aren’t entirely communicated as reality but more the interior feelings of the characters at the moment. They use moments of literal times stopping as a character sings or showing background characters who are doing backup and then reacting to whoever is singing with funny expressions because they are acting funny. Those are some solid jokes in those scenes.
I feel the changes made to the story probably do work for younger audiences, and it’s a bit more saccharine and more open, as I feel the Zs and the Alphas are. There are no racial cliques in the cafeteria anymore in this one. No Gretchen joining the Cool Asians in this one. The original Mean Girls was based on the parenting book Queenbees and Wannabees and had dynamics that were very much based on the world of the end of Generation X and the beginnings of the Millenial Generation and much how the teen world works has changed even as some things stayed the same. While I feel this new movie is good, I also don’t think it’s for me. There’s an openness to it that the more recent generations have that might be in conflict with what older fans of the old film might want and expect of it. The old movie wasn’t a classic for me since I was far enough away from High School (and Black) that it was just a Lindsay Lohan movie for me. This film is better served on the big screen than just being a streaming release like initially planned. The songs are very good with great performances, especially from the core three girls in this version. Mean Girls does a great job of updating Mean Girls, and it’s admirable that it’s willing to evolve past the nostalgia to connect to a new generation of teens who might need the lessons the story is trying to tell.
P.S. They should’ve kept the epilogue from the old movie, though. It was good closure.
Score: B+
RIOTUS 