TV & Movies/Movies

Mean Girls
What: Movie, 112 mins.
Where: In theatres
When: Fri., Jan. 12
Genre: Musical — surprise!
Rating: NNN (out of 5)
Why you should watch: Inspired casting and a knockout performance by Reneé Rapp excuse the relentless cheese of this musical’s lyrics — almost.

YEP, that new Mean Girls film you’ve seen advertised on the subway is a musical — surprise!

For those of us in the know (cough, cough, theatre kids), this Mean Girls is a film adaptation of the 2017 musical of the same name, itself a theatricalization of the classic 2004 film. The musical stopped in Toronto last fall — complete with those clunky, clunky lyrics by Nell Benjamin — and now it’s back in this sparkly film starring pop ingenue Reneé Rapp as Regina George.

Mean Girls marks the directorial debut of Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr., and keeping that in mind, the film’s not half bad. Set in 2024(ish), the broad strokes of the story are the same: Cady Heron (played by a sweet Angourie Rice) has just moved to the U.S. from Kenya, and she’s trying to adjust to high school. Artsy outcasts Janis (Moana’s Auli’i Cravalho) and Damian (a standout Jaquel Spivey, making his film debut after wowing on Broadway as the lead in A Strange Loop) take Cady under their wings. Before long, they exact a plan for revenge on the school’s queen bees, The Plastics, played fabulously here by Rapp, Bebe Wood and Avantika Vandanapu.

You likely know the rest. Cady becomes popular, eventually replacing head Plastic Regina and ditching her real friends. Lessons are learned. Math competitions are won.

And, alas, songs are sung.

To be honest, we’re about due a decent Mean Girls remake, and this one could have been that! Its cast is funny and earnest, with slick directorial choices by Jayne and Perez Jr. that make the most of TikTok filters and other Gen Z-isms, not to mention some very fun cameos. Tina Fey’s screenplay is surprisingly down-to-earth, and represents 2024’s teens well — there are few instances of the film condescending to teens for their internet habits or lingo. For once, a film about the follies of teen-hood is in on the joke.

But those songs were questionable to begin with when they were on Broadway — the lyrics weighed down otherwise fine musical theatre tunes. However, those tunes, too, are changed here: made less melodic and more breathy, they’re an odd mishmash of the worst of pop and Broadway aesthetics. Carvalho and Spivey are the only actors allowed to sound like the trained theatre performers they are — even stage veteran Rapp sounds over-produced here, heightening the ridiculousness of those damn lyrics.

Lest you think I’m exaggerating:

• “It’s a revenge party with your two best friends / It’s like a party with revenge is what it’s like.”
• “This whole school humps my leg like a chihuahua.”
• “Imagine a party with dresses and cake / and singing and dancing and cake.”

Yeah.

And it’s a shame because the filmmaking as a whole is quite good — a number of one-shot sequences (particularly during Sexy and Someone Gets Hurt) flex some cinematographic prowess under director of photography Bill Kirstein, and editor Andrew Marcus has made magic of cyberspace with impressive flips between the real world and its digital alter ego. The themes introduced in 2004’s Mean Girls remain relevant today — perhaps even more so with the introduction and evolution of social media — and again, stripped of its musical-ness (or at least with a more critical eye to Jeff Richmond’s score), those themes could have had more room to blossom against a 2024 landscape.

So. Mean Girls. It’s fun! I liked it! But it’s not hard to see why Paramount opted to skirt around its musical-ness in its marketing.