“Mean Girls” PEOPLE Review: Reneé Rapp Is Fetch (and Then Some!) in Musical Reboot of Lindsay Lohan Comedy

Angourie Rice takes over from Lindsay Lohan as the nice girl who tries too hard to be liked

Unlike the new Color Purple, the musical version of Mean Girls doesn’t deepen or enrich the original film, a hit comedy from 2004 that featured an expertly crafted script of jokes and pop references by Tina Fey, as well as one of Lindsay Lohan’s most appealing performances.

Oh, Lindsay, Lindsay, Lindsay! After all these years, your name still lights a flame in the poetical mind — to set those two syllables to rhyme, to music, to anything!

Then again, how deep or rich should a musical of Mean Girls have to be?

Let's back up for a second. It should be said that the first Mean Girls, inspired by a nonfiction book of parental advice called Queen Bees and Wannabes, had a compact, sharp-angled neatness that made you look past the fundamental cruelty of its story about high-school rivalry, betrayal, humiliation and intimidation.

You might think of it as a vehicle that, should you be forced once more to undergo the adolescent nightmare of taking your driver’s test, could be parallel-parked with no sweat.

Related: Here's How You Know the Cast of the 2024 Mean Girls Movie

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In its light-handed way, the original Mean Girls also suggested something of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s famous observation: "High school is closer to the core of American experience than anything I can think of.” (Election, of course, is the purest film realization of that thought. )

This new Mean Girls, though, is more like an SUV that keeps running over the curb and knocking down mailboxes. Admittedly, much of the material is the same, just given glancingly clever updates.

A throwaway line that once hinged on Ladysmith Black Mambazo now hinges on Neil deGrasse Tyson. It got a laugh then, and it gets a laugh now. But modern musical-comedy conventions, or at least the ones imported here from a hit Broadway production, aren't subtle. Go big, as they say, or go home.

The film culminates in an incident of body-shaming that comes close to sadistic slapstick. The scene isn't necessarily even meant to be funny (or is it?), but it jars.

If anything, Mean Girls makes you appreciate the skill that went into creating the bizarre and provocatively primitive Dicks: The Musical.

Related: Mean Girls Premieres in N.Y.C.: See All the Stars on the Red Carpet

Mare of Easttown’s Angourie Rice, giving off a fresh-scrubbed Amy Adams vibe, takes over from Lohan as Cady Heron, a high-school newcomer who spent years off in the wilds of Africa. Even though she’s more at sea in this adolescent society than Brittany Murphy's Tai was in Clueless, Cady somehow wins the approval of the “Plastics” — the mean, glamour-girl clique headed by a blonde monster named Regina George (Reneé Rapp) .

Encouraged by two other marginalized students (Auli'i Cravalho and Jaquel Spivey), Cady plans to subvert Regina and her adjutants — it's a kind of undercover operation — but she herself ends up as thoughtlessly plastic as Barbie.

Although, thanks to Greta Gerwig's gestalt-defining movie comedy, we now know that the Mattel doll has philosophical curiosity and depth. You could have called Hannah Arendt "Barbie," and she might have thanked you. Times really do change.

Besides, shallowness isn't always a bad thing, either — not, at any rate, when it's embodied by the utterly fabulous Reneé Rapp as Regina. Rapp, who was also in the show’s stage production, plays Regina with a combination of lethal sexual command and — briefly, anyway — winning vulnerability. Ripely delicious and rather preposterous, Rapp suggests a combination of Smash’s Megan Hilty and Sharon Stone.

Compared to her, everyone else — including Avantika and Bebe Wood as the other Plastics; Fey and Tim Meadows, reprising their roles as faculty members; even Busy Philipps as the “cool mom” played by Amy Poehler in the first film — tumbles down and falls away, like chalk cliffs endlessly battered by a surging sea.

The musical numbers are mostly bright, brash and frequently awful. The songs just keep coming at you, noisily whirring with speed and determined to make maximum impact. It’s gym-class dodgeball all over again.

Mean Girls is in theaters Friday.

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