Mean Girls was a sensation when it came out back in 2004. I remember because I worked at a high school at the time. This movie was a cultural phenomenon.  It changed how girls dressed, talked, and even acted in their everyday lives. Whether it was for the good or bad this movie became part of the lexicon. Now there is a remake based on the Broadway play based on the original movie. Did we really need a remake of such a culturally important film? That question remains to be answered.

Like the original movie Cady Heron, this time played by Spider-man franchise alumni Angourie Rice. She moves from Africa with her mother back to the States and goes to high school for the first time. She meets some friends on the first day. Janice (Auli’i Cravalho) and Damian (Jaquel Spivey) show her the lay of the land in her new school. In the process of learning about who’s who and what’s what at the school she’s introduced to a group of uppity girls known as “the plastics”. Three girls led by Regina George played by Renee Rapp this time out instead of Rachel McAdams. Like the original film, she is the queen bee at the school. 

Anybody familiar with the original film knows how this story is going to go. It’s a remake of that twenty-year-old classic. The original movie had a sense about itself that stood out and became something bigger than it should have been this film jumbled up too much and loses its way in all the various things it’s trying to do. The singing for instance is very bad with the songs not being memorable at all. One particular number about Regina George being the king of the jungle was cringe-inducing to be blunt about it. I couldn’t even watch all the crazy dancing and so forth.That was at the beginning of the movie it got worse after that.

Aside from one actress who played Janice all the other actors were terrible. Even Tim Meadows and Tina Fey who reprised their roles from the original film weren’t very good. They even repeat stuff they said in the original film and they couldn’t make those lines work this time around. These actors were all over the top and doing bad versions of these characters. Especially Rapp as Regina George. She was in her own world in this role and it didn’t work at all. Rice was okay but the rest of the cast including Bebe Wood as Gretchen Weiners and Avantika Vandanapu as Karrn Shetty. Both of these girls were terrible in their roles as well. They were horrible stereotypes of what these characters were in the original film.

With this being a Musical remake the songs have to be catchy and the hook has to get the audience involved. That’s not the case here. The songs were terribly sung by actors who couldn’t sing their way out of a paper bag. The songs weren’t catchy at all and I just wanted to cover my ears every time someone broke out into one of these horrible songs. This did not need to be made into a film. The original film was fine just the way it was. And a stage version I’m sure was fine as well, I haven’t seen it to judge that, but this singing version didn’t work for me at all.

This version of the 2004 movie was updated for the times. With technology such as YouTube and FaceTime the filmmakers Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. were able to infuse modern-day things into the film. These aspects were overused and implemented in a not-so-good manner. In fact, they were quite annoying, to say the least. Gossip and so forth is part of what goes on at school and the original way the first film used The Burn Book was much better and the advances in social media and technology didn’t help this story at all. This aspect of the story was wasted from my perspective.

Mean Girls 2024 was a shallow version of the original classic. The singing and dancing was terrible. The acting from most of the cast was nowhere near as good as the original cast and that includes some actor reprising their roles from the original movie, except I did like Auli’i Cravaho as Janice. She was the best part of the movie for me. This version failed to show much redeeming qualities that the original had in spades. The cultural relevance of the first film was shown everywhere at the time. This movie is a small comparison of that classic. It just shows not every great film should be remade even if it’s a musical version.

1 star

Dan Skip Allen