Mean Girls review: Fetch just can’t happen twice

What exactly are we meant to get from a remake of Mean Girls? This is, of course, the existential quandary of any remake: to find a purpose beyond simply being a brand regurgitation of something that was once successful and popular. But the 2024 version of Mean Girls is doubly cursed in this regard, functioning both as a retelling of the 2004 film and as a film adaptation of the Broadway musical inspired by the film. Is the introduction of musical numbers conceived for the stage enough of a reason to mine this material for the screen once more? Or is this a soulless retread that finds screenwriter Tina Fey revisiting her same story (itself adapted from the book Queen Bees And Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman) 20 years later without finding anything new to say? The answer to both, strangely enough, is yes.

The plot and structure of the original film have been fairly rigidly adhered to with some minor modifications to accommodate the songs, so it’s hardly worth belaboring the already well-known beats. What’s disappointing is that the film seems to mostly agree, so characters whose journeys felt relatable and human in the original now feel like Cliff’s Notes versions of themselves. Angourie Rice’s version of Cady Heron has had her zoological interest in her classmates stripped bare in favor of purely wishing to have a normal teenage social life, a rather reductive interpretation of the character. We are often told through the medium of song that Reneé Rapp’s Regina George is a domineering queen of the school, but her presence in the film never really holds that kind of gravity, even with Gretchen (Bebe Wood) and Karen (Avantika) submissively hovering in her orbit.

The plot hatched by art weirdos Janis (Auli’i Cravalho) and Damian (Jaquel Spivey)—absolute showstealers both comically and vocally—to have Cady infiltrate the Plastics clique as revenge for Regina’s awfulness is technically present in its entirety, along with Cady’s transformation into a popularity-pursuing monster, but the beats feel like they are on fast-forward without giving the actors much space to find their own interpretations of these characters. This likely has everything to do with the unavoidably referential nature of the stage musical it’s adapting. The musical numbers and callbacks to the memeable jokes of the 2004 film work well for a production that is couching its existence on fondness for, and familiarity with, a popular film; a whole subgenre of stage musicals relies on this exact conceit. But it’s bizarre for a film remake to couch itself so heavily on that same familiarity, recycling jokes enough times that it comes across as cynical. It begs the question of why you wouldn’t just watch the original again.

The obvious answer there is the songs, and the tragedy of those misplaced narrative priorities is that the musical numbers, on their own, are actually very well staged and performed. This is the feature debut of directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr., who make a meal of these sequences, setting up complicated shots that move through expertly choreographed dancers and convey heightened emotion to great effect. “Someone Gets Hurt” is an eerie trip through Regina’s manipulation of Aaron (Christopher Briney) at a Halloween party full of frozen, stuttering teens. “Revenge Party” is a chaotic technicolor party in the confetti-strewn halls of the school, and “I’d Rather Be Me” is just a barnburner showcase of Cravalho’s command over the camera. It’s easy to see why the stage musical was popular with songs this energetic and fun, so it’s heartening to see Jayne and Perez translate that energy to screen with such joy and fervor.

But this isn’t a review of a string of musical numbers in a YouTube compilation. Within the context of Mean Girls the movie-musical-remake, these highlights are overshadowed by the film’s inability to stand on its own. The songs and the performances thereof have been packaged in such a way that they are now more accessible than ever, for an audience that mostly never got to see them performed as originally staged. Yet the film that inspired them has been reduced to a hollow shell in which to carry them, like so much plastic meant to be thrown away.

Mean Girls opens in theaters on January 12