Mean Girls (2024) Movie Review | Film with Angourie Rice, Reneé Rapp and Tina Fey

Review: Mean Girls (2024) doesn’t cover enough new ground to warrant the movie’s existence. The music is surprisingly fresh, and the performances are often the best aspects, but it’s a copy-and-paste concept executed to marginally acceptable results. Tina Fey relies heavily on the original material to render the movie passable.

Renee Rapp and Avantika in Mean Girls movie from 2024 — Reneé Rapp and Avantika in Mean Girls (2024)

Cannibalized and sedated even moreso than its 2004 original that sacrifices genuinely searing satire for studio comedy hijinks, the 2024 adaptation of Mean Girls leaps off the Broadway stage and into theaters (and surely streaming services soon). With a stylistic facelift trying to convince you there’s a reason for its own existence, the movie resorts to an identical regurgitation of the same clumsy plotline, only slightly emphasized with a few noteworthy performances.

Helmed as a passion project once again by screenwriter Tina Fey, and conveyed on screen by co-directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr., Mean Girls undoubtedly rollicks through all the hits. The characterizations are all relatively similar in their largest parts, from Angourie Rice displaying the two sides of Cady similarly to Lindsay Lohan did two decades ago, to Reneé Rapp headlining the titular clique nearly as well as Rachel McAdams did.

The cast is largely where 2024’s Mean Girls succeeds and elevates beyond being a complete mess. Reneé Rapp stands out as best representing a tone that works in strides here – slightly acidic, often demented, and not as nice as all the music and set design would have you thinking. She’s working opposite a cast that’s otherwise your run-of-the-mill streaming teen comedy (although Christopher Briney co-starring after his role in Amazon’s The Summer I Turned Pretty almost zeroes Rapp’s performance out).

These two movies achieve their best results when indulging in their more acidic sides. But the musical elements wash away much of that side in this film. Mean Girls is too peppy and sanitized to feel like it’s making any real impact this time around, and in turn just goes through the motions. Scenes in this iteration are less natural and sincere, like the gym sequence where students apologize one-by-one on a makeshift stage. In the original, this serves as one of the emotional pillars to its overly message. This time, it’s trying to get from line to line as quickly as possible before the next musical number begins.

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The incorporation of devices like smartphones is a nice touch, perhaps best serving as something new to the material. Mean Girls at its basic form is a critique of childish high school behavior, and that’s only amplified nowadays by the introduction of social media and online chatrooms. This core theme isn’t quite developed enough in the film to feel like there’s any weight to its message, but the electronic interstitials and intercut TikTok videos are there nonetheless.

The music is actually quite passable. To put it frankly, I’m not a big fan of movies with this specific delivery and tone (tick, tick…BOOM! and In the Heights, to even West Side Story and La La Land – just not my style of entertainment) but there were a few choreographed scenes that had me interested. Cady’s outsider friends Janis and Damian are played by Auli’i Cravalho and Jaquel Spivey, respectively, and both share a few powerful songs that are among my favorite in the movie.

But ultimately, the Mean Girls (2024) doesn’t cover enough new ground to warrant its existence. The music is surprisingly fresh, and the performances are often the best aspects, but it’s a copy-and-paste concept executed to marginally acceptable results. If you like the original movie, the reimagining will win you over. For skeptics, there’s just not much to discover anew.

Rating

Genre: Comedy, Musical

Watch Mean Girls (2024) on Paramount+ and VOD here

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