Mean Girls (2024) (2024)

January 13, 2024 9:59 PM

Cady Heron (Angourie Rice) is a hit with the Plastics, an A-list girl clique at her new school when she makes the mistake of falling for Aaron Samuels (Christopher Briney), the ex-boyfriend of alpha Plastic Regina George (Reneé Rapp). It's like the 2004 movie, except now it's a musical!

This was adapted from the 2018 Broadway musical, written by Tina Fey (who wrote the original movie) with music by Jeff Richmond and lyrics by Neil Benjamin.

posted by edencosmic (9 comments total)

This is fun to a certain extent. The cast is great -- Auliʻi Cravalho is amazing as Janis and Reneé Rapp brings a certain amount of ruthlessness to Regina. I loved the fearlessly wacky and unhinged take Avantika had for Karen.

The plot updates are reasonable and welcome but it does sand off some of the more cruel edges, for good and bad ways. I liked that it did make it as much as Janis' story as it was Cady's (and the conflict between Janis and Regina works better).

Angourie Rice is fine here. Cady is something of an everygirl and she plays it well, but the movie's decision to style her almost exactly like Lindsay Lohan in the original made it so she couldn't really make this part her own. (I've liked her in other things I've seen her in -- she's fun in Honor Society, which does feel like it took some Mean Girls inspiration.)

The music is fine. The numbers are staged really well -- they're basically fantasy music video sequences but it works. I don't find the songs to be particularly memorable, though, but they do their job in contributing to the plot.

I'm not sure who this is really for, though. It relies so heavily on calling back to the original movie that it can't be its own thing. Also, the original movie feels like it's so deep in pop culture consciousness that it's going to be nearly impossible for this to do anything new. Of course we want the classic lines here, but that's also what holds it back.

(Also, there's apparently some sort of Mean Girls multiverse because Tina Fey and Tim Meadows play the same characters from the original movie, down to working at the same high school, and yet they have no memory that any of this happened before with students sharing the same names. I don't know why that bothered me as much as it did but, it did.)

I am not unhappy I went to see this. It's fun. It's colorful. It has a lot of good moments. It goes by really quickly, in good and bad ways (it's under two hours but parts feel a bit rushed).

I'm just not sure who asked for this.
posted by edencosmic at 10:11 PM on January 13

I'd be very interested to hear what fans of the musical made of this.
posted by Lorc at 1:46 AM on January 14

Tiny typo alert — the lyricist is Nell Benjamin (not Neil) — she also was one of the writers for the musical version of Legally Blonde.
posted by profreader at 8:41 AM on January 14 [1 favorite]

I'd be very interested to hear what fans of the musical made of this.

A friend who saw it says this cut some songs and shortened others, which makes me a lot less inclined to see this.
posted by one for the books at 12:50 AM on January 15

I really enjoyed this, so many call backs and one liners. Rapp does so well as the villain, playing her a lot more rough edged than McAdams' version. I wish we'd got more Karen jokes.
posted by soelo at 5:42 AM on January 15

I'm not sure who this is really for, though.

They marketed it as "not your mother's Mean Girls" which, A, ouch, and B, why wouldn't you try to appeal to the likely #1 demo for the movie? Very odd.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 2:36 PM on January 15 [7 favorites]

I thought it was pretty bad. The conflict is unearned, the 'mean girl' crew seems to be almost quaint in how different cliques are now, and the songs kinda dull. The leads friends never did anything particularly friendly - they encouraged her to spy! I've never seen the original, so maybe there's a bunch I'm missing. I actually thought the mom of the lead mean girl acted circles around the kids, and they missed a much funnier movie.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:57 AM on January 16

and the songs kinda dull.

There's a great TikTok trend going around with people comparing bits of the Original Broadway Recording to the movie soundtrack - they really sucked the life out of the music!
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 6:54 AM on January 18

Example
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 6:55 AM on January 18 [1 favorite]