‘Mean Girls’ Musical Film Is Not Fetch, But Reneé Rapp Kills as Regina

A lot has changed in the 20 years since Regina George and the Plastics first stalked the halls of North Shore High. Every teenager now has a smartphone. Social media has given several generations new ways to slay, shame, and talk shit. The Internet is one massive Burn Book. And yet, if Mean Girls 2024 proves anything, it’s that some things truly are forever: There will always be cliques, there will always be drama, mathletes will always rap about their calculus skills, school buses are still a hazard, and high school remains a sociological jungle filled with pecking orders and food chains. Only this time, the apex predators and the carrion they feast on will sing and dance.

From the moment that Tina Fey adapted her beloved 2004 comedy into a musical-theater extravaganza, it was inevitable that we’d get a movie based on the Broadway hit based on the movie. As we speak, your favorite film has either already been or is probably about to be turned into a musical, and if you were lucky enough to catch Mean Girls on stage, you could see how the transition from screen to stage played off nostalgia while adding a few extra grace notes into the mix. (Every production should be so lucky to have a gorgeous, two-minute heartbreaker like “What’s Wrong With Me?”) The pipeline goes both ways, and since the musical is the version that several new generations have rightfully claimed as theirs, they deserve the single most fetch big-screen remake they can get.

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That’s not this new Mean Girls, however, unless a cluttered, chaotic take on the Broadway show that often makes you wonder if the North Shore High theater department is putting it on is what you think Gen Z, etc., really want. Fey may have taken on screenwriter duties again, turning the book she wrote for her hit play — based on the script she originally penned that drew from Rosalind Wiseman’s insightful Queen Bees and Wannabes — back into a screenplay suitable for multiplex consumption instead of a musical-theater night out. But directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. don’t always know what to do with it, and for every set piece that does work, there are many more that simply mistake frenetic cutting, fit-to-burst framing, and white noise as moviemaking. No one’s expecting the second coming of MGM’s Freed Unit here, but dear god, transforming Mean Girls: The Musical into a hot mess was definitely not on our wish list.

To be fair, there’s still a lot of good stuff that manages to work its way through the sound, fury, recycled quotes, and endless callbacks. The transition from “A Cautionary Tale,” the opening number that establishes Janis (a terrific Auli’i Cravalho, making good on her Moana promise) and Damian (Jaquel Spivey) as narrators, to “It Roars” — which introduces Cady Heron (Angourie Rice), fish-outta-water and future Alpha Plastic — takes you seamlessly from suburban garage to African savanna to Evanston, IL., schoolyard in a blink. The way that choreographer Kyle Hanagami turns “Apex Predator” into the opposite of anthropomorphism by making North Shore’s student body a menagerie of crawling, skittering, growling beasts amps it up a hundredfold. “What’s Wrong With Me?” still kills, giving this version’s Gretchen (Bebe Wood) her standout moment. The perpetually clueless Karen (Avantika) still turns lyricist Nell Benjamin’s “this is modern feminism talking!/I expect to run the world in shoes I cannot walk in!” from the song “Sexy” into a tongue-twisted gem, even if the number itself feels botched as a whole.

The fact that the directors lean heavily on TikTok stylistics and faux-phone recordings for a lot of their numbers makes sense on the page, since that’s how so much musical content gets created and consumed these days. By the time that trope gets used for the gajillionth time during a musical number that would have benefited from a bit more visual breathing room, however, you start to feel like it’s become a crutch. Ditto the famous-faces casting —Jenna Fischer, Jon Hamm, and Busy Philipps playing Cady’s mom, Coach Carr and Ms. George, respectively, turn what might have been characters into nothing but celebrity cameos. (Not to be confused with an actual celebrity cameo here that’s pure [chef’s kiss].) At least Fey and Tim Meadows, reprising their roles as Ms. Norbury and Principal Duvall, remind you why they were so great in the original; someone should make them the new Nick and Nora Charles. The absence of the showstopping-in-a-bad-way “Stop” feels like a wise move. Other M.I.A. numbers like the bouncy “Where Do You Belong?” are missed way more than you’d think.

But there’s one person that almost singlehandedly makes you forgive Mean Girls for all its trims from the stage show and trespasses against the touchstone original. In 2019, Reneé Rapp took over the role of Regina George on Broadway, and eventually left the production for mental-health reasons. She’s returned for the film version, and from the moment her Regina swaggers into the school lunchroom, the actor owns this film. Nothing against Rice, Cravalho, Christopher Briney (he plays sensitive math-nerd heartthrob Aaron Samuels) or her fellow screen Plastics. Or for that matter, O.G.-Regina Rachel McAdams. It’s just that Rapp knows exactly how to vamp, go vulnerable, toxify an environment, bask in adulation, dole out attention or withdraw it, and rock an icy stare in a way that makes you feel she now owns this role. Even the way she spins a familiar line like “Get in, loser!” is unique.

Then Rapp steps up to deliver Regina’s declaration-of-vengeance “World Burn,” and you suddenly feel like Mean Girls momentarily delivers on everything you want this musical to be: fierce, fun, funny, and somehow frightening in its power to remind you that high school is indeed hell. You don’t need to know her backstory to feel like this is a victory lap. Most of the student body quivers in Regina’s presence, and the movie seems to tremble in awe of Rapp’s ability to make you think she’s not a Queen Bee but the Queen Bee. Her limits don’t exist. You wish the rest of Mean Girls rose to meet her.

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