Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B
Music: B

When I saw the original Mean Girls in 2004, I felt even then that it was overrated, an ultimately unsuccessful attempt at being the 21st-century contemporary answer to the 1988 cult classic Heathers. I felt at the time that Heathers was a far superior comedy, with biting humor that Mean Girls lacked. Ironically, not even Heathers has aged especially well from a 2024 vantage point—and it should be noted that Mean Girls was released 16 years after it; this new iteration of Mean Girls is coming out a solid twenty years after the first one. (The Broadway musical adaptation of the 2004 film, on which this new film is based, had its first production in 2017—thirteen years after the movie. Are you following all of this?) These days, surely far fewer viewers of Mean Girls have any idea what Heathers even was than viewers in 2004 did, making Heathers far less relevant to this movie than it was to the 2004 movie.

It’s been so long since even the 2004 film, all that truly matters now is how well the current film works, within a 2024 framework. And I’d say it works . . . fine. I enjoyed this one more than I seemed to enjoy the first film twenty years ago, but not by a wide margin.

I was relieved to find the music catchy, if relatively forgettable. There has been a bit of press about the promotion of all the musicals released in the past couple of months, most notably Wonka, The Color Purple, and Mean Girls: the trailers for all of them were edited so that it was not clear in any of their cases that they are actually musicals. Are promoters afraid audiences aren’t interested in musicals? If so, why they hell are they making them at all? And god knows, Wonka was a genuine hit—with utterly forgettable music throughout—and the 1 p.m. Saturday screening of Mean Girls I went to was far from sold out, but still had a surprisingly robust crowd at it.

I’ll say this: I had a good time, and I can’t imagine ever going out of my way to see Mean Girls, the musical adaptation of a Broadway adaptation of a movie adaptation of a novel originally called Queen Bees and the Wannabees, again. The 2004 film was famously co-written by, and co-starred, Tina Fey, whose profile was much higher at the time than it is today; she also wrote the book (though not the lyrics) for the Broadway musical, and gets sole writing credit for this new film adaptation, while appearing, yet again, as one of the teachers at North Shore High School. To Fey’s credit, the script is updated well to 2020s sensibilities, if possibly a little off the mark when it comes to how high school teenagers actually behave toward each other anymore.

Last year’s Jennifer Lawrence comedy No Hard Feelings felt a little closer to the mark with this, with high school kids much more sophisticated than they used to be, and far less tolerant of bigoted or sexist behavior—granted, these things can easily still be very regional, and bear in mind I have not personally spent any real time inside a high school myself in a solid thirty years. Nevertheless, there is a thematic undercurrent to this Mean Girls which, being based on something twenty years old, feels a bit dated.

I still have a basic complaint about it: Mean Girls doesn’t have mean enough girls in it. It might be more appropriately called Girls Who Hurt Each Other’s Feelings, which is, just as before, the basic, simplistic lesson: girls can be uniquely catty with each other, they fight, and the ones with a genuine conscience ultimately make up.

Fair enough, I suppose, especially for audiences who are, let’s say, adolescents. On the upside, Mean Girls is cast with exceptional performers, with Angourie Rice (first seen as the 13-year-old in The Nice Guys; later the young-adult daughter in the HBO limited series Mare of Easttown) in the part of Cady Heron. Rice fits comfortably in the role of both awkward newcomer and one of the so-called “Plastics,” the clique of vapid popular girls. Reneé Rapp is especially effective as Regina George, the thoughtless leader of the Plastics, her musical numbers consistently the best vocal performances in the film.

Among Regina’s two main acolytes, I have more mixed feelings about casting a brown woman (Avantika) as the pointedly dumb one. In fact, the supporting cast is fairly diverse, including Auli’i Cravalho (who had voiced the title character in the Disney film Moana) and Jaquel Spivey as the queer kids who first befriend Cady at her new school. But, there’s no getting around the fact that casting the two leads as White girls was no accident, and thus centers Whiteness with all this array of other, diverse characters revolving around them. I love Tina Fey, but this does seem to be a lasting blind spot with her. (One might argue that this particular story doesn’t work the same way if the leads aren’t White, but I would not accept that argument.) Taken in isolation, Mean Girls could be given a pass on this front; the issue is that it’s part of a long established pattern, which not enough people talk about.

Casting considerations aside, Mean Girls is relatively harmless, a pleasant enough time at the movies, a fairly successful capitalization on nostalgia for something that was never that special in the first place. As with its predecessor, Mean Girls comfortably sidesteps a whole lot of potential, leaving us with both a sense of what it could have been, and a satisfying experience of something hovering just one or two steps above mediocrity.

*I want to see the movie about the supporting players.*

Overall: B