Mean Girls: Doesn’t Mess With What Made Them Mean in the First Place

From the comedic mind of Tina Fey comes a new twist on the modern classic, MEAN GIRLS. New student Cady Heron (Angourie Rice) is welcomed into the top of the social food chain by the elite group of popular girls called “The Plastics,” ruled by the conniving queen bee Regina George (Reneé Rapp) and her minions Gretchen (Bebe Wood) and Karen (Avantika). However, when Cady makes the major misstep of falling for Regina’s ex-boyfriend Aaron Samuels (Christopher Briney), she finds herself prey in Regina’s crosshairs. As Cady sets to take down the group’s apex predator with the help of her outcast friends Janis (Auli’i Cravalho) and Damian (Jaquel Spivey), she must learn how to stay true to herself while navigating the most cutthroat jungle of all: high school.

Review:

High School translates into comedy, drama and musical forms fairly well. The new Mean Girls manages to straddle all three. The 2004 version was a good comedy. The 2018 Broadway version was a successful comedy musical of the Tina Fey scripted original. So the 2024 movie adds a decent amount of soap drama to the mix, raising the bar a little bit, without messing with the hijinks and characters that made it work well enough.

This Mean Girls is content to be a middle hybrid child. It’s tart, sweet, sometimes over padded, but still a winner. Cady’s (Angourie Rice) transformation from nice girl to mean girl and back is successful because she manages to flow between the high school cliques more or less effortlessly. She’s both moral mirror to the true lead meanie, Regina (Renee Rapp who played the role on Broadway) and moral example, the change agent needed for any high school histrionics tale.

Cady is a quick study who learns and unlearns the rules of the high school jungle. She’s the true rounded character that can do things the stereotypes can’t. Like the common genre theme, Cady is a character heading towards self actualization and empowerment. She allows the others to see broadly without really changing. They learn the lesson but are powerless to change themselves because their character needs to remain the same for the sequel.

The usual complications- a chaste romance involving jealousy, revenge and misunderstanding; comeuppances, repentance and triumph- are the same, only the three card monte shuffle is new. The new movie version drops a few songs from the Broadway one, allowing the songs to blur together into a pleasing jumble whenever the plot requires a thematic and character appropriate song to make everything feel significant. They’re hummable but just barely ear wig memorable. The only gripe is that these are singers who act their role rather than redefine or truly define it. They can’t emote with the nuance of the original 2004 troupe. There is oomph and swagger but not much character depth outside of Cady.

The directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr., making their feature debut, keep things moving and popping. They splash on bright colors and break the fourth wall, filling the frame with smartphone images in which characters look directly at the camera. Fey doesn’t change the script except for some minor era updating for social media and new fashion styles and slang and more savvy jokes.

This version still loves its two lead characters. Rapp is pleasant yet unlike Lindsay Lohan never manages to sway us that she has gone truly mean. Rapp’s powerhouse vocals only make her Regina more dominant than Rice’s more demure singing. This mean girl is more fun than the nice one.