‘Mean Girls’ Review: Tina Fey’s Regurgitated Movie Musical Is a Tuneless Mess
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Mark Waters’ hit comedy about the savage jungle of high school cliques, Mean Girls, had enough instant-classic dialogue and memorable characters to become a touchstone for the generation either in or fresh out of their teens when it was released in 2004 and those who have discovered it in the years since. With screenwriter Tina Fey continuing to steer the vehicle, the property navigated the transition to Broadway musical in 2018 with plenty of its original charms intact and some even fortified thanks to the expressive magic of characters bursting into songs that reveal their inner lives.
The show was never going to keep Stephen Sondheim awake nights with its workmanlike tunes composed by Fey’s husband, Jeff Richmond. But Nell Benjamin’s frequently clever lyrics delivered laughs and director-choreographer Casey Nicholaw’s flair for kinetic showmanship made it a high-energy explosion of hormonal insecurity, malice, vulnerability and hard-won life lessons. A top-notch cast didn’t hurt, either.
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But all the effervescence and fun have been drained out of the material in this labored reincarnation, a movie musical made by people who appear to have zero understanding of movie-musical vernacular. Debuting co-directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. are best known as collaborators on the FX shortform series Quarter Life Poetry, but their choppy work here seems firmly entrenched in Perez’s music-video background. The same goes for choreographer Kyle Hanagami.
The songs seldom spring organically from the story and more often feel so awkwardly shoehorned in that you come to dread them. What’s worse is that the music is so gratingly over-produced and studio-enhanced you miss the high of characters spontaneously singing. In terms of musical deficiencies, that’s a deal-breaker. The final nail in the coffin is the creative team’s decision wherever possible to frame the songs through social media. The device is used so unrelentingly you start to wonder why the entire movie wasn’t made on TikTok. Maybe it would be less of a garish eyesore on a smartphone.
I wish I could say the cast offered some redemption, but only Auli’i Cravalho as Janis, the punky outsider played in the original movie by Lizzy Caplan, appears sufficiently in her natural element to make much of an impression.
The biggest disappointment, arguably, is Regina George, so divinely rendered by Rachel McAdams in the 2004 movie and by Taylor Louderman on Broadway that the name alone has become synonymous with evil teen queen, a young woman as witheringly imperious as she is gorgeous. Reneé Rapp stepped into the role in the second year of the show’s New York run, reprising it here in what must be said is the not-so-great tradition of screen high-schoolers in their mid-20s.
Onstage, Regina strutted into every scene like a Bond vixen, bathed in a pink glow that made both her beauty and her cruelty seem almost otherworldly. Here, she’s nasty but seldom funny, perhaps reflecting a shift in the culture that now makes it harder to milk comedy out of bullying snark. The numbers that elevated Regina to arch-villain status in the musical have been flattened into generic anthems of self-love and superiority so muddied by a brutally homogenized pop sound mix that half her lyrics are garbled.
The story hits all the familiar marks. Cady Heron (Angourie Rice) has been home-schooled by her mother (Jenna Fischer) in Kenya, making her transition from the African savanna to the wilds of North Shore High a major cultural jolt. She gets a 101 intro to the school’s rigorous caste system from the two students who remain determinedly outside it, Janis and her “almost too gay to function” best friend Damian (Jaquel Spivey, the talented star of A Strange Loop on Broadway).
They warn her to give a wide berth to “The Plastics,” the trio consisting of Regina and her minions, Gretchen (Bebe Wood) and Karen (Avantika), described by Janis and Damian as “shiny, fake and hard.” But when Regina takes an interest in Cady — albeit a possibly conniving one — and invites her to join them for lunch, Janis and Damian see it as an opportunity to get some dirt on the mean girls.
Cady’s spying assignment becomes complicated when she develops a crush on her calculus classmate Aaron (Christopher Briney), who turns out to be Regina’s ex. At a Halloween party where Cady’s corpse bride costume makes her the odd one out (“If you don’t dress slutty, you’re slut-shaming the rest of us,” Gretchen tells her), Regina snatches Aaron back, because she can. That leads Cady, Janis and Damian to regroup for a revenge plan, but Cady’s indoctrination into The Plastics becomes so complete she loses sight of herself.
There’s something depressingly rote about all this, as if Fey has told the story too many times to find anything fresh in it, beyond the superficial Gen Z pandering of constant phone screens. Even the role she reprises from the original film, as math teacher Ms. Norbury, lacks zest. Another recruit from 2004, Tim Meadows, scores a few mild laughs as the principal. But the handful of stars in secondary roles, including Jon Hamm as the gym teacher and the original Broadway Gretchen, Ashley Park, as the French teacher are either wasted, or in the case of Busy Philipps as Regina’s “#AgingHotly” mother, excruciatingly over the top.
While Australian actor Rice is fine as the initially guileless Cady, none of the characters has enough definition to make you forget their more incisive predecessors. Having a key 2004 Mean Girls star make an extended cameo just serves as a reminder of how much more of everything the original and its stellar ensemble had, whether it’s subversiveness, wit or heart. Even the earlier movie’s savvy take on teen anxiety, social hierarchies, peer pressure, female toxicity and power dynamics feels scarcely warmed over in this lackluster treatment. Perhaps the 20-year-old material is just past its prime?
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