School of schlock

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This article was published 12/01/2024 (985 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Get in, loser. We’re going to a musical comedy.

This new take on Mean Girls is based on the 2018 Broadway show, which in turn was adapted from Tina Fey’s endlessly quotable 2004 teen movie. This 2024 iteration is in constant conversation with the original, with patchy results.

Mean Girls superfans might be happy to see that poor Gretchen is still “trying to make ‘fetch’ happen,” for instance — though in a bit of meta-comedy, she relates that it’s “slang from some old movie … maybe Juno?”

Despite several scenes that are beat-by-beat re-creations of the first movie, the overall tone has shifted, becoming sweeter and more earnest, losing some of that sharpness. And the new musical dimension often just gets in the way.

Mean Girls is still insightful and funny in spots, but it might be even more insightful and funny if its words weren’t muffled by mostly mediocre song-and-dance numbers.

Fey’s first script was based on Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabees, a non-fiction study of the psychosocial lives of teenage girls amid high school cliques, gossip and bullying.

We’re back in Girl World, once again following Cady Heron (Spider-Man: No Way Home’s Angourie Rice). Cady has been living in Kenya, where she has been homeschooled by her zoologist mother. (Mom is played by Jenna Fischer from The Office, and Rice does, at times, resemble a young Pam.)

Relocated to an Illinois high school, Cady, wide-eyed and wearing a plaid shirt and sensible shoes, must navigate the ruthless hierarchy of the classroom and the cafeteria. She gets aid and advice from outsiders Janis and Damien (played by Moana’s Auli’I Cravalho and scene-stealing rookie Jaquel Spivey).

Cady learns about jocks, mathletes, band kids and grade grubbers, but she gets a special warning about the Plastics. This trio of “cold, shiny, hard” girls is led by Regina George, played by Renee Rapp (The Sex Lives of College Girls) as a kind of magnificent monster. In high school terms, Regina is an apex predator: “Will she braid your hair, or will she eat your heart?” one song asks, and it’s a legitimate question.

Cady ends up infiltrating the Plastics, passing as a pink-clad acolyte along with Gretchen and Karen (Love, Victor’s Bebe Wood and Senior Year’s Avantika), while crushing on Regina’s ex, Aaron Samuels (Cristopher Briney from The Summer I Turned Pretty). It’s a risky ploy. Cady is pretending to be a Mean Girl, but she might just become one. Consider the musical question posed in the movie’s opening number: “How far would you go to be popular and hot? Would you resist temptation? No, you would not.”

The songs, which are rarely memorable musically or lyrically, struggle to break through. (“Smart with math but stupid with love” isn’t really a hook.) Since the movie musical’s heyday, in the 1930s, ’40s and ‘50s, Hollywood cinema has mostly lost the knack of translating the energy of a live musical to the screen, and Mean Girls is no exception, with choreography that often feels cramped and constrained by high school halls.

It’s no fault of the very able performers. The original film helped launch Lindsay Lohan (who makes a cameo here), Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfried and Lizzy Caplan. This gifted new generation seems similarly poised to take off, especially Rapp, who is as cool and commanding as any Regina must be.

Fey and Tim Meadows reprise their roles as teachers, now even more emotionally exhausted, while Jon Hamm drops in as a seemingly hungover coach, and Busy Philipps plays Regina’s mother (“Not a regular mom, a cool mom,” as she insists on telling us).

There are updates to bring in a new audience, especially in terms of teen tech. The Burn Book from the original is here as a kind of ancient archeological relic, but most of the adolescent-girl damage comes from viral TikToks.

The discourse feels more 2024, with characters talking about love languages and slut-shaming and allyship. Fey’s takedown of hyper-sexy Halloween costumes has expanded (now with sexy corn and sexy Eleanor Roosevelt).

There’s still a lot of fun to be had in this overall amiable film. If only the smart dialogue and story flow didn’t keep get interrupted by kids breaking into song.

Alison.Gillmor@freepress.mb.ca