Mean Girls (2024)

Directed by Samantha Jayne & Arturo Perez Jr. Starring Angourie Rice, Reneé Rapp, Bebe Wood, Auli’i Cravalho, Christopher Briney, Jaquel Spivey, Avantika, Tim Meadows, Tina Fey, Busy Philipps, Jenna Fischer, Mahi Alam, Jon Hamm. [PG-13]

A film version of a musical adaptation of a popular teen movie twenty years removed from its prime sounds like the sort of project Jenna Maroney would be excited to land while Liz Lemon looks on, exasperated. There’s hope here, though, because Liz Lemon herself is intimately involved in its development and production. Talk about results as synonymous with her last name… I don’t know if it was Tina Fey or someone else, but whoever thought it would be a good idea to take Mean Girls (the “Clueless of the 00s”, in how it was a popular teen movie that looked like it was going to be crap, but sharp writing and good casting made it a good time) and give it a fresh coat of “diversity paint” and strain it through a “TikTok musical” filter should take a moment to rethink their values and priorities. And, hey, I normally champion growing diversity in mainstream filmmaking, but when you’re dealing with superficial high school cliques…no, now’s not the time (in terms of general appearance and fashion, who thought the girls here would make for convincing “Plastics”?). Story is the same—exactly the same—and virtually every story beat and quotable is recreated straight-up without a twist, so its selling point should be what’s new, right? You know, the songs? Well, they often come at a barrage, so there’s no skimping there, but they’re worse than immemorable…they’re really, really bad—generic and slipshod melodies, poor mixing and synching, pitchy vocals, the lyrics spelling out the obvious at every turn, the boring choreography looking like it’s trying to “go viral”, and the visual arrangements being just as brash and assaulting as the music (it will surprise no one to learn the two credited directors are each making their feature debuts here). They may have hidden the “musical” part of this rehash (or else why not call it Mean Girls: The Musical to stand out from the original movie?), but there’s no getting past this—no new actor matching or improving on who previously played their role and a reliance on “greatest hits” lines/jokes are why this thing would have been kind of lame as is, but the awfulness of its song production choices is why it actually flat-out sucks. Star of the original Mean Girls, Lindsay Lohan, makes a gratuitous cameo appearance.

18/100