- Starring
- Angourie Rice, Reneé Rapp, Auli'i Cravalho, Jaquel Spivey
- Directors
- Samantha Jayne & Artuo Perez Jr.
- Rating
- PG-13
- Genre
- Comedy, Musical
- Release date
- January 12, 2024
Overall Score
Rating Overview
Rating Summary
“Mean Girls,” released in 2004 and directed by Mark Waters, was based on the self-help book “Queen Bees and Wannabes” by Rosalind Wiseman. Written by Tina Fey, the film grossed over $129 million worldwide against a budget of $17 million. Its box office success, coupled with its subsequent popularity on home video and streaming platforms, contributed to its lasting cultural impact and cult status among audiences.
Mean Girls 2024
Raised by a single mother/research zoologist, and homeschooled in the wilds of Africa, Cady Heron finds herself unprepared for what awaits her upon their return to the U.S.
Drawn into the exclusive circle of the school’s most elite clique, The Plastics, Cady quickly realizes that navigating high school is akin to traversing the Savanah. Overwhelmed by the allure of popularity and influence, Cady succumbs to temptation and ends up hurting those she holds dear.
Will she be able to find redemption in time for the Spring Formal?
Mean Girls 2024 is a love letter to fans of the original. Unlike most modern remakes, it neither disrespects the source material nor presents a soulless copy of its progenitor. Instead, it slaps a new coat of paint on it all, modernizing some areas and improving others. However, the most significant change is that this Mean Girls is an all-out musical. In point of fact, the ratio of song and dance to spoken dialogue may be enough to classify it as an operetta.
Filled with all of the beats that fans of the original loved (i.e., description of the cliques, Cady fawning over Aaron, the Christmas talent show, etc.), only with many of them transformed into song and dance numbers, Mean Girls jumps into the overly complex and emotional realm of female relationships with both feet.
Aided by some fairly well-crafted, if not dynamic, dialogue, Mean Girls will get you from A to B. Neither this nor the original version were particularly complicated stories, which isn’t necessarily necessary. Both movies rely on the characters and theme to keep audiences engaged, and this one has the added bonus of some well-done musical sequences.
Unfortunately, except for Regina’s theme song (more on her further down)/entrance and the Halloween song (again, a Regina piece), the musical numbers are well performed but otherwise generic and unmemorable. Audiences will tap their toes and bop along during each piece, but only the most musically inclined superfans will leave the theater able to remember any of the melodies well enough to hum them.
That said, the musical bits are the show’s saving grace, as many spoken dialogue scenes feel like interminably long obligatory afterthoughts, the only purpose of which is to get to the next song. However, Mean Girls 2024 does have one more thing going for it. While some of the performances are marginally better than that of the original (Angourie Rice is a superior actress to Lindsay Lohan), Reneé Rapp, who plays the wicked Regina George, shines brightest.
Aided by a fantastic set of pipes and the movie’s most dynamic tunes, Rapp is Regina George. Where Rachel McAdams gave a subtle and nuanced (relative to the material) performance, Rapp’s George is an apprentice-to-Maleficent show pony. She owns the character completely. Reneé knows she is playing someone larger than life with a personality big enough to dominate an entire city school, and she delivers.
With all of that said, this is beginning to sound like a glowing review, but it’s important to remember that this is all relative to the original, and both movies are dumb. Whether it’s the cartoonishly naive Cady who caves to peer pressure almost from the moment that she’s on-screen only to cave to peer pressure a few scenes later only to cave to peer pressure for the finale, the completely neutered school principal played well in the original and phoned in on this version by the usually reliable Tim Meadows, or the annoying-but-we-should-love-her-because-she’s-an-outsider Janis, both versions of Mean Girls are peopled with unlikeable characters and “teach” a banal and meaningless message: Be yourself and Girls should stick together.
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James Carrick
James Carrick is a passionate film enthusiast with a degree in theater and philosophy. James approaches dramatic criticism from a philosophic foundation grounded in aesthetics and ethics, offering insight and analysis that reveals layers of cinematic narrative with a touch of irreverence and a dash of snark.
I love you guys… but why did you even review this one hahaha. I mean, I don’t know anyone that was going to watch this. This is a blue haired septum piercing tiktok Gen Z trash movie.
Keep up the good work… but there’s no reason to torture yourself.
Gotta get them clicks, yo.
Only one correction: Dyed its hair, not died. Otherwise, great work! I won’t be seeing this one.
Good catch.
I thought this was a movie adaptation of the popular Broadway musical? Either way, I’m not watching this. The musical never interested me, nor did the movie. And I’m a theater kid.
High school flicks like this one have never been honest portrayals of what high school actually looks like for most students. Mean Girls has always been a fantasy for those who are hyper-sexualized and either were status-chasers or wanted to be status-chasers.
If there is a real lesson that should be gleaned from a film about unlikable and hypocritical girls bullying each other because they take pleasure in seeing people suffer, it should be that behaving arrogantly and cutting others down doesn’t make you a better or happier person. That, and it’s not worth it to throw away your best traits and embrace bad ones to impress people who aren’t even good at pretending to be your friends. I didn’t learn that from reading any self-help books or watching high school movies. Life taught me that around the age of 13, and I’m glad I learned it early. Many young people never learn and retain their childish status-chasing habits well into adulthood.
While Hollywood is obsessed with making remakes, I wish they would do a modern version of ” The Watermelon Man” where a White man takes a new medication and it turns him Black and all he goes thru when that happens. But in a new version, I would love to see a movie where the opposite happens and someone like Rev Al Sharpton wakes up White and has to put up with anti White racism and discrimination.
I disagree the woke message has been “just be yourself.” To me it’s always been, “join us or else…” I saw the original film just last week. I had never heard of it prior. My friend from Italy couldn’t believe me. I enjoyed the original and felt relatively safe watching a 20 year old film–safe from snooty left wing virtual signaling. The lines the reviwer highlighted seem extremely woke to me, enough to keep me from watching the remake.
Why would you link “redlining” through the New York Times? I’m genuinely curious. Haha, I love your reviews, don’t get me wrong. But on a site that’s doing good work warning people about woke media, you could’ve linked to one of a hundred other sources, and not one of the most, if not THEE most woke text-based media sources in the United States. That just gives them site traffic when people click on it; and I don’t think anyone here, including yourself, wants that, hahaha! Anyways, cheers, and thanks for the article.
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