NATHAN WEINBENDER:
2004’s Mean Girls is something of a millennial touchstone. With its disarmingly sharp script by Tina Fey and nimble performances by Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams, it cleverly deconstructed teen comedy conventions and developed an unshakeable grip on early 21st-century pop culture. Most people my age understand references to making "fetch" happen and wearing pink on Wednesdays, so even if it isn’t a great movie, it’s definitely an enduring one.
As with so many popular comedies, Mean Girls was reworked into a Broadway musical in 2018, and now the stage show has inspired its own film adaptation. (That makes it, to steal a quote from Fey’s series 30 Rock, a movie based on a musical based on a movie.) This new big-screen Mean Girls, again scripted by Fey (who also returns as math teacher Ms. Norbury), is more or less a dutiful cover version of the original, save for some mostly forgettable songs and contemporary references to hashtags and Snapchat filters.
Angourie Rice takes on the original Lohan role of Cady, a homeschooled teenager whose anthropologist mother (Jenna Fischer) has moved them from the plains of Kenya to an upper-middle class American suburb right before junior year. Now at a public school for the first time, Cady is mentored by outcasts Janis (Moana’s Auli’i Cravalho) and Damian (Jaquel Spivey), whose time as wallflowers has allowed them to observe the rituals and habits of every clique.
The high school ecosystem revolves around the Plastics: the vindictive Regina George (Reneé Rapp) and her followers Gretchen Wieners (Bebe Wood) and Karen (Avantika). They’re wealthy and selfish and, yes, very mean, and Regina sees Cady as a lump of socially awkward clay she can mold into her own image. Janis and Damian, meanwhile, see this as an opportunity to knock the Plastics from their queen bee perches, and they convince Cady to sabotage the group from within, all while she slowly transforms into a Plastic herself.
20 years on and not much has changed, save for the technology that high school kids use to bully each other. In fact, Mean Girls 2.0 has full scenes that are essentially facsimiles of scenes from the original, with word-for-word recitation of jokes that were funny then but are here delivered with less conviction and satirical bite.
Of course, this Mean Girls has music—full-on song-and-dance numbers like in a Broadway show—but the tunes all sounded more or less the same to me. First-time feature directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. photograph the musical numbers mostly in tight medium shots, and in classrooms and hallways and living rooms, so that the movie never opens up visually when it breaks into song.
At least it has a good cast: Rapp, who played Regina George on Broadway, isn’t merely imitating Rachel McAdams, and she finds a disarmingly vulnerable note within a venomous role. Spivey, star of the Tony- and Pulitzer-winning musical A Strange Loop, gets the biggest laughs as Damien, and Busy Phillips has a lot of fun as Regina’s mom, desperate to be a peer rather than a parent.
I tend to be forgiving of a mediocre play if the production has a scrappy energy and the performers are delivering, but that kind of in-person electricity usually doesn’t translate to film. It doesn’t this time. What might have been a kick onstage feels like a needless recycling job when it’s put back up on the big screen. All it does is leave you wishing you were watching the real thing instead.
For Spokane Public Radio, I'm Nathan Weinbender.
——
Nathan Weinbender is one of the film critics heard on Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, Friday evenings at 6:30 PM here on KPBX