The 2004 Mean Girls was a cultural juggernaut that shifted the comedic landscape, proving that female-led comedies could achieve commercial and critical success. The movie boasted nuanced characters, clever writing, and incisive observations about cliques, conformity, and the pursuit of popularity.
The movie, satirizing social hierarchies and the absurdities tied to teenagedom, defied similar comedy movie stereotypes, which had previously often reserved the best and raunchiest jokes for the men — as women provided the human laugh track or looked on and gasped at the crudeness of their remarks. This time, the ladies were coming in with the one-two punches. Without Mean Girls, would we have Bridesmaids, Easy A, The Duff, The Edge of Seventeen, or even the musical splendor that is Pitch Perfect?
While the 2004 Mean Girls remains a staple among its millennial fanbase, with many able to quote the film’s iconic lines, such as “you can’t sit with us, “on Wednesdays, we wear pink,” “that’s so fetch,” “boo you whore,” and “the limit does not exist,” the 2024 movie musical based on the Broadway musical based on the original movie (got all that?) is no more than an uninspired victory lap. It relies on the widespread familiarity surrounding the original to compensate for its lack of fully-fleshed characters and musical mediocrity.
In the new movie, Gretchen, Karen, Cady, and Regina feel like caricatures: 2D, singe-quirk versions of their complex predecessors. Cady’s transformation to the top of the totem pole happens without much development. Where’s the slow boil? It’s been replaced with music video montages and intermittent dialogue referencing classic quotes to get a smirk out of its hungry-for-Lindsay audience.
Regina George is no more than a “quintessential leader of the pack” and “bad bitch” whose prior latent vulnerability and insecurity fails to fully surface (despite Renee Rapp’s hypnotizing presence and voice).
Gretchen is the defeated sidekick whose moment of reflection in her solo “What’s Wrong With Me” suffers from a simple melodic structure and lyrics that are disappointingly generic and predictable. And while Karen has always been the Rose Nylund of the group, the OG Karen (like Rose) possessed emotional intelligence that revealed itself as the movie progressed. Here, her IQ and EQ are, unfortunately, on an even playing field.
The movie’s lack of narrative substance and failure to flesh out each character arc largely results from the fact that it’s not a “musical” but more of a movie with music video moments — in the sense that the songs do not serve the story, but rather interrupt it; they often seem to complement or reflect on what has already been communicated in other ways. A good musical will use song to drive the story and develop its characters; the music will both tell the story and paint the character’s inner monologues and emotional baggage.
The songs here don’t only feel like listless diversions, but fail to live up to the Broadway version on account of bad singing, orchestral changes, lyric adjustments, bizarre tonal inconsistencies, and immemorability. Much of the theatricality has been erased from the show and replaced with poppy, talk-singing vocals that don’t quite “sing,” but rather “enunciate with a bit of melody.” The actress playing Cady Heron, Angourie Rice, is clearly struggling with the singing component, and her delivery lacks all the DRAMATICS we want in a musical…probably because her vocal range can’t convey them. As various characters lend their pipes to the movie musical, the only one who manages to rise to the occasion is Rapp — who played Regina on Broadway, and even her moments suffer from some cinematic choices.
Some musical moments in Mean Girls feel like they’re ripped right out of High School Musical — with all the gymnastics-infused choreography and wide-eyed expressions akin to the Disney classic. Others offer up tinted red lenses to convey a sense of mystery and brooding contemplation while others feature slow-mo effects and the breaking of the fourth wall in a way that’s reminiscent of musical moments in animated Pixar and DreamWorks films (except nowhere near as satisfying as the “I Need a Hero” moment in Shrek 2; look it up).
As the musical jumps from one truncated song to the next — leaving out developmental lyrics from the Broadway bash — there’s no thread connecting the musicality. The songs play as music videos belonging to different artists, belonging to different genres, belonging to different stories. It’s tonal whiplash that, without the existing Mean Girls, would be an utter mess. (The audience knows the story so there’s forgiveness in place for loose threads and poor connections since the 2004 hit has fortified such threads.)
And, when the final song plays and the movie comes to a close, not a single number is left buzzing around in your brain…maybe “Apex Predator” accomplishes this, but how can you make a movie musical and fail to give us a couple of earworms…especially if you’re not going to reinvent the original tale in any meaningful way? When all are burned and betrayed, we would’ve been better off never meeting the plastics again.
