Mean Girls
The 2024 film version of the 2017 musical of the whip-sharp 2004 film now feels like a passé parody.
Smoulder like you mean it: Bebe Wood, Angourie Rice and Avantika
When Mark Waters’ Mean Girls opened in 2004, it cut like a knife through the high school sitcom template. The genre was already a well-trampled one, but by taking a relatively straight comic spin on Rosalind Wiseman’s serious bestseller, Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and Other Realities of Adolescence, it proved hilarious. It also turbo-charged the careers of Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfried and Lindsay Lohan, the last named who has a cameo here as a mathematics’ moderator (and is virtually unrecognisable). Needless to say, the 2004 film gained a cult following, spawned a sequel (Mean Girls 2) and fourteen years later was turned into a Broadway show. Of course, this is now a familiar path for many a musical (cf. the sly, ebullient Hairspray), but Waters’ Mean Girls was very much a figment of its time and the genre has undergone numerable transitions since then. And Tina Fey, the film’s original scenarist, who has taken on the musical remake, is now 53.
In its new guise, this panto re-mix seems not only hackneyed but dated, with the High School Musical format at odds with its material. The language of American teens changes on an almost weekly basis, and it takes a writer of the insight and imagination of Mindy Kaling (whose Netflix sitcom Never Have I Ever… is on the button) to keep track. Here, the neologism of “grool” (a mix of “great” and “cool”) seems more at home on the set of an older musical (cf. Oliver!).
As Cady, the new girl on campus, Angourie Rice does the best she can with the material (she’s a dead ringer for a young Amy Adams), but is a little too white-washed. She’s a good sight better than the celebrated singer Reneé Rapp, who is not only miscast as the “queen bee” Regina George (although she played the role on Broadway), but swallows her consonants, making it hard to know what she’s singing about. Changing gear from a giant New York stage (The August Wilson Theatre) to the intimacy of a New Jersey classroom, Rapp has over-compensated with her ‘naturalistic’ enunciation, although the physicality of her performance is still overtly theatrical. Tina Fey and Tim Meadows return from the old film in their original roles to welcome effect, while the sprinkling of well-endowed 16-year-old clique members all look like they’re in their twenties (which they are). A musical doesn’t have to be this broad – or farcical – and the original film certainly wasn’t. Some genuine edge, or a smidgen of credibility, could have reaped dividends. The best laugh is courtesy of Tina Fey herself (of course), when she snaps, “Hey, PG-13, please!” If only.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Angourie Rice, Reneé Rapp, Auliʻi Cravalho, Jaquel Spivey, Avantika, Bebe Wood, Christopher Briney, Jenna Fischer, Busy Phillips, Tina Fey, Tim Meadows, Lindsay Lohan, Jon Hamm, Ashley Park, Connor Ratliff, Mahi Alam.
Dir Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr., Pro Lorne Michaels and Tina Fey, Screenplay Tina Fey, Ph Bill Kirstein, Pro Des Kelly McGehee, Ed Andrew Marcus, Music Jeff Richmond, Costumes Tom Broecker, Sound Tom Ryan.
Broadway Video/Little Stranger-Paramount Pictures.
112 mins. USA. 2024. US Rel: 12 January 2024. UK Rel: 17 January 2024. Cert. 12A.
