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Carefully calibrated to appeal to that overlap in the demographic Venn diagram where queer teenagers, theatre nerds and Tina Fey fans intersect, this song-and-dance reboot of the 2004 film Mean Girls kind of works. The musical comedy numbers are funnier than the situational comedy, which is often contrived, the best zingers recycled from the original soft satire of US high-school cliques.
For those who haven’t done their homework: this new film (directed by Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr) is based on Fey’s 2018 Broadway show, which was itself an adaptation of the 20-year-old teen comedy, which was based on a 2002 book. The first Mean Girls movie featured a formidable roster of stars then in the making, including Lindsay Lohan as a naive homeschooled girl who infiltrates the clique run by head mean girl Rachel McAdams. It had just the right blend of snappy snark and goofy charm to make it a cult classic.
It helped that the screenplay was written by Fey, an anointed star of Saturday Night Live, who also played a key role. She is still on board for Mean Girls 1.2, onscreen and off, but her scalpel doesn’t cut quite as deep. The analysis of teen popularity dynamics feels out-of-date compared with last year’s glorious queer teen comedy Bottoms. As if aware that the material risks feeling passé, the filmmakers insert whizzy montages of people reacting on social media, the film starting to resemble one long TikTok. There’s a good reason that platform limits the duration of videos: viewers can only handle so much of people saying “omigod!” and cascades of emoji reactions.
On the plus side, the new Mean Girls has a laudably more diverse supporting cast, but the leads — Angourie Rice in the Cady role originally played by Lohan, and Reneé Rapp taking over from McAdams as Regina — fail to remake the roles in their own image.
Both are upstaged by Avantika Vandanapu as Karen, an academically challenged bombshell who gets to sing the film’s wittiest song, about how women can be anything they want on Halloween as long as it’s sexy. Its key lyric, “This is modern feminism talkin’/ I expect to run the world/In shoes I cannot walk in,” is a perky, Barbie-level summation of feminism’s cognitive dissonance. But, for all its good intentions, the rest of the film lacks both Barbie’s ample budget and raw originality.
★★★☆☆
In UK and US cinemas now
