Comedy is a hothouse flower and a fickle kind of magic, perfected by those who make it look easy, even though it’s anything but. For it to work, it has to feel special, organic, weightless. If you try too hard, it can fall apart. If you try to recapture the spark of something hysterical, the mere act of recapturing it can strip away every ounce of joy. It’s why remaking comedies is notoriously tough to do — you need to capture the essence of what made the original movie funny, but you can’t smother it or draw too much attention to the fact that you know people laughed at it the first time.
Mean Girls (2024), the new musical-comedy based on the 2017 Broadway musical off the same name, which itself was based on the Lindsay Lohan-led 2004 teen comedy masterpiece Mean Girls, is perhaps the best cinematic example of what works and what does not work when adapting comedy. The 2004 Mean Girls was a lightning-in-a-bottle teen comedy, where every line was instantly devoured and quoted ad nauseum by everyone who saw it, and where every actor’s performance was so pitch-perfect that lines as innocuous as “That was one time!” and “But you love Ladysmith Black Mambazo!” can leave you in stitches. To try to recapture that would be a fool’s errand — but this is an errand that first-time director duo Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. felt confident enough to embark upon, alongside OG Mean Girls actors Tina Fey (who wrote the screenplay) and Tim Meadows. If those lines and moments were insta-iconic nuggets of mid-aughts teen rom-com absurdism, the same lines being reused and recycled in Mean Girls (2024) are the cinematic equivalent of what happens when someone you love tries to tell you the funny parts from last night’s Kimmel, but without his comedic timing.
Maybe that assessment is harsh — after all, this movie is actually funny when it isn’t simply replicating previous jokes. It wears the silliness of being a musical on its sleeve, with a band constantly following characters around (or hiding in trees, or apologizing to each other for micromanaging each other’s performances in previous songs), and even a moment when Fey threatens to deliver a belter, only to clear her throat. The crown jewel, however, is the cast — where to even begin?! Reneé Rapp’s Regina George, Angourie Rice’s Cady Heron, Auliʻi Cravalho’s Janis ‘Imi’ike (finally given the chance to be the unambiguously queer woman she was meant to be in 2004) and Jaquel Spivey’s Damian Hubbard are all show-stopping renditions of these characters. If the film isn’t immediately forgotten, it may help make each of them a household name — yes, even those who are already doing great for themselves, like Nice Guys scene-stealer Rice or The Sex Lives of College Girls star Rapp or, of course, Cravalho, Moana herself.The list of other outstanding supporting characters feels endless, though Fey and Meadows revisiting their old roles really takes the cake (Busy Phillips as Regina’s mother is too perfect. “Slay like no one’s watching!” Absolute queen.)
Still, some other problems linger, such as the fact that it feels like it may age like milk due to the persistent use of TikTok and Instagram and other social media, though it’s hard to fault the film for this. Mean Girls (2004) has endured for many reasons, but one of them is that it existed right on the precipice of social media, but before it became anywhere near what it is today. Including TikTok permanently dates this movie, but excluding it would be borderline disingenuous and completely unrealistic. It also felt too heavy-handed in its “be yourself” messaging — the story of Janis’ former friendship with Regina George feels like it came from an episode of Heartstopper, and the “here’s the moral of the story!” finale removes all of the subtlety of the original movie and replaces it with a brick. The movie clearly doesn’t think we’re too dumb to understand, but it’s hard to know if it was intended to appeal to the millennials who loved Mean Girls (2004), or the youths of today who are undoubtedly being forced to watch it by, well, their parents who are also those same millennials.
The biggest, and perhaps the most complicated, problem is that for a film called Mean Girls, the film is just light on the meanness. The world is different than it was in 2004, and many of the jokes and situations from the original simply aren’t acceptable anymore (see: Coach Carr’s habit of sleeping with students, then played for laughs). Society’s relationship with open empathy is constantly in flux, but Mean Girls (2024) should have been a haven for an updated version of the biting humor of both the Mean Girls (2004) and the musical. The music from the latter is cutting because it was intended to lean into the razor-sharp edge the OG film had, and it’s what made the Broadway production an unexpected, pre-pandemic hit. Little of that shines through here, allowing jokes about how “Y2K firecrotch is BACK!” but neutering old jokes like “You can’t become a mathlete, that’s social suicide!” and making it “that’s socially ruinous,” as though the mere use of the word “suicide” is too ghastly to entertain. It feels like they were working with kid gloves, too reverent and indebted to its source material, and a little too terrified of attempting to interrogate these characters and what makes them tick. Would the film have worked with Rice doing her version of Lohan’s voiceover inner monologue from the original movie? Who knows, but we lose that connection to why Cady does what she does throughout the film, and it means that her character simply doesn’t stand up on her own in the same way.
Mean Girls (2024) is a strange, fun mess of a film. Though toothless, it also seeks to right character wrongs of the past (namely, not only making Janis gay, but giving her a DATE to the Spring Fling!) and amplify the charms that made the original such an enduring classic. Initially intended as a Paramount+ release, it was upgraded to a theatrical release three months before it came out, perhaps a gamble to capitalize the “musical wave” of The Color Purple and Wonka (and, if you’re nasty, the fabulous Dicks: The Musical, but it’s hard to imagine Paramount execs registering that film’s existence). It’s hard to say who this was even made for, but judging by an advance screening jam-packed with pink-clad people taking ring-lit selfies with their own Burn Books, there’s a market of aging millennials hungry to relive the spark of unbridled joy that Mean Girls made them feel 20 years ago. Perhaps this will become a cult classic in its own right, courtesy of the passable (but catchy) songs, the killer performances and the effort of it all. Then again, maybe it’ll just go the way of “fetch.” Only time will tell.
Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures
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