Starring: Angourie Rice, Renee Rapp, Auli'i Cravalho, Jaquel Spivey, Avantika, Bebe Wood, Christopher Briney, Jenna Fischer, Busy Phillips, Tina Fey, Tim Meadows, Lindsay Lohan, Jon Hamm, Ashley Park
Distributor: Universal Pictures
Runtime: 112 mins. Reviewed in Jan 2024
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc
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Cady Heron is a hit with the Plastics, an A-list girl clique at her new school. But everything changes when she makes the mistake of falling for Aaron Samuels, the ex-boyfriend of alpha Plastic Regina George.
The original Mean Girls was an instant success in 2004. It was based on a popular novel, Queen Bees and Wannabes, 2002, by Rosalind Wiseman. Audiences, especially teenage audiences, responded immediately. And the screenplay was written by Saturday Night Live writer and sharply ironic comedian, Tina Fey. It was a star vehicle for Lindsay Lohan, contributed to the career of Rachel McAdams and was a starting point for Amanda Seyfried and Lacey Chabert.
Mean Girls was successfully brought to the Broadway theatre as a musical in 2013. Now, 20 years after the original film, here is the screen version of the musical. Fey and Meadows reprise their 2004 roles – Ms Norbury and Mr Duvall. This time there are some guest cameos, including Hamm as coach, Fischer is the heroine’s mother, Phillips is the mother of the Queen Bee Regina George (Rapp), and, in the final Mathletes’ competition, Lohan is the compere.
Audiences who enjoy seeing the film version of a Broadway musical will go along. However, while it is exuberant, its 2020s, social media, Tik-Tok vibe, as well as franker and coarser language, the question would be how much it would really appeal to the, say, over 30s (or even the over 25s). It is almost two hours spent in the company of teenagers that many in the audience might want to avoid in real-life, and on the screen.
While the plot is the same, there was something about the meanness in the original film that caught audience attention, dramatic ploys, one-liners, sometimes an almost admiration for the clever meanness. This time, it just seems so often meanly mean.
Australia’s Rice is the young student from Kenya, Cady, eager to go to high school in the US. She is pleasant in the role, at first the victim, then absorbing the meanness of the elitist Plastics clique in the school. On the other hand, Rapp is dominating – completely believably mean and gets everyone’s attention. There are some clever performances from the supporting cast.
Briney (The Summer I Turned Pretty, Daliland) is the charming boyfriend, linking with Cady in Fey’s calculus classes.
There is some truth in an IMDb blog comment, ‘It’s like watching several music videos with a modern mean girls in between’.
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