Fetch didn’t happen, but the Mean Girls remake did. The movie was released on January 12th and was directed by Tina Fey, who plays Mrs. Norbury in both the original 2004 movie and the reboot. Renee Rapp reprises her role as Regina George from her brief stint in the Broadway musical. It scored a six-point four out of ten on IMDb, but it was…definitely a movie. The movie follows Cady Heron, a transfer student from Kenya as she falls in love with the It Girl Regina George’s ex-boyfriend, Aaron Samuels, and lands herself in hot water with the queen bee and her right-hand girls.
TLDR: Mean Girls 2024 is a perfectly fine movie if you separate it from the musical and keep your bar so low, it’s starting to roast a little bit. But if you make the mistake of going spoiler-free, like this review will not be, you will be surprised because of just how bad it is.
BEWARE, spoilers beyond this point! I will be ripping apart this entire movie and laughing about it because I cannot believe what they’ve done to my beloved cult classic.
First, the outfits. Regina George looks cheap. I’ve seen every single one of her shirts on Shein and they did not end up in my cart, so how do they end up on It Girl, Queen Bee, untouchable rich girl Regina George? Renee Rap rocked those looks as best as she could, but sometimes, lime green parachute pants just cannot be saved. Her leather pants looked so fake I could hear the sounds of a Zara as I was sitting in the theater.
And Janis Ian…she looked like every other girl. Auli’i Cravalho did her best to embody the outside-the-box style of the original Janis, but at the end of the day, she looked just like everybody else in cheap, ill-fitting clothing. She was missing the uniqueness of handmade-textured clothing that the original Janis had. Her most “punk” outfit was a puke-green knitted stripe and fishnet sweater with straight-legged, light-wash jeans.
Karen, Gretchen, and Cady were left mostly untouched, and their outfits made sense for their characters. During the Halloween party, Regina is dressed as an angel, which I found incredibly ironic because of how devilish she is.
Next up, the songs. Mean Girls was very pointedly not advertised as a movie musical, even though it was. The movie took key songs from the Broadway musical and unfortunately, butchered most of them. “A Cautionary Tale,” “What ifs,” “Meet the Plastics (Regina’s Part Only),” “Stupid With Love,” “Apex Predator,” “What’s Wrong With Me?,” “Sexy,” “Someone Gets Hurt,” “Revenge Party,” “World Burn,” “I’d Rather Be Me,” and “I See Stars” were all featured in the movie.
A Cautionary Tale mostly got out unscathed and was a good break in the fourth wall that was consistent throughout the movie. Mean Girls took on the challenging task of integrating the movie and the musical and modernizing both of them. A Cautionary Tale was the very first attempt to do both of these things at once, and compared to every other attempt in this movie, it performed the best.
Changing the other two plastics’ verses in Meet The Plastics to speaking lines was not a good choice, because it took away how overwhelming all three of them are together. Letting Regina have the entire spotlight takes away from the other two crucial parts of the group because Gretchen and Karen are important to Mean Girls in a way that the movie just would not be feasible without them.
Stupid With Love got mauled. There’s no other way to put it. Cut and dry, Angourie Rice sucked all the life out of this fast-paced, acid dream about Cady Heron tripping and falling on her face in love with Aaron Samuels. In the musical version, she’s losing her mind because she’s finally starting to get this phenomenon that has evaded her for her entire life. In the movie, she’s so relaxed about it, it’s less tripping and falling and turns into just..stepping into it. Which is not the point. The high notes Rice tried to hit fell so flat it was like listening to week-old soda.
Apex Predator lost all its anger for a more vulnerable approach. Barrett Wilbert Weed, the Broadway Janis Ian, sounds downright murderous. But in the movie, Cravalho sounds like she’s reliving her middle school experience instead of warning Cady to stay away from Regina. Damien also gets all of Cady’s lines, which changes the meaning of the song severely. Cady is no longer aware that she is in a very precarious situation, and if Regina had the slightest inkling that harm was coming her way, Cady would be banished and thrown to the wolves. Damien and Janis are now watching and waiting for her to crash and burn. This song was changed because Rice cannot sing, but without a lyric change, Apex Predator no longer made sense.
The Revenge Party felt like a fever dream. Nothing felt real because of how ridiculous the dancing was. It was used as a plot device to move the movie forward, which was tastelessly and literally brought up later in the movie. This song details everything Janis, Damien, and Cady do to Regina to try and ruin her life, and the camera angle chosen for Cady buying a candy cane to use Gretchen against Regina was a .5 below-the-chin shot. I can see why they might have thought it was a good idea in theory because it was recorded “through Cady’s phone,” but it just made Rice look bad and forced me to look away so I could get through the rest of the movie.
In the musical, World Burn is the height of Regina’s power struggle and where she realizes that Cady has dethroned her, but didn’t end her completely, and intends to capitalize on that. She uses the Burn Book in her favor, but Rapp’s vocals sound hollow without the backing track exclaiming things written in the book. But, we finally have a studio version of her opt-up at the end of this song. Little victories. Other than not having that backing track, World Burn survived just fine.
Regina seemed a lot friendlier in this movie than in the original. Small changes were made, like her spinal halo after being hit by a bus (yes, she’s still hit by a bus!) being changed to a corrective neck collar, but the biggest was Regina forgiving Cady for ruining her life because she was on a lot of painkillers and they “made her like everyone.” In the movie, Regina very intentionally does not forgive Cady and instead comments that she should stop making it about her, Regina was the one that got hit by a bus. That’s the more appropriate response than Regina telling Cady to not apologize for things that weren’t her fault.
And the product placement. Barbie had product placement, but it was subtle. With taste. Mean Girls took the concept of subtleness and threw it into a blender. Damien asks Cady what lipstick she’s wearing post-Revenge Party and it is so obviously just an ad for Elf. An attempt was made to cover it up by Damien remarking he was just making sure Cady’s ears still work, but it fell flat. Regina is also shown to be using the Elf Lip Oil by dropping it into the sink and the camera focusing on the label. Seat Geek also got themselves into the movie, which might have even been worse than Elf because of the way Lindsey Lohan (yes, the Lindsey Lohan from the first movie) announced the mathletes competition was sponsored by Seat Geek.
Bubly was also placed in the movie, but it’s never commented on and was the only good product placement in the whole thing.
Social media played a more important role in this version of Mean Girls, which makes sense since it’s supposed to be a more modern version, but it felt out of place having cameo after cameo of popular internet stars talking about Regina and Cady’s drama. Pictures were also used from Rapp’s Instagram that were unrelated to the movie, picturing the actress with bangs. I did like that it showed off how fast the internet shifts gears from loving someone to hating someone, but beyond that I felt that it didn’t have a place in the movie.
Other than the outfits, the casting, what was done to the songs, and the product placement, the Mean Girls reboot wasn’t horrible! A lot of iconic moments were featured in the movie and were delivered well, like Damien’s “none for Gretchen Weiners, bye.” Rapp played Regina well and is really the only reason this movie is worth seeing.
Fey followed the plot of this movie down to the letter, and I appreciate that with everything else that went wrong. Mrs. Norbury and Principal Duvall were shown to be in an on-screen relationship, which was a fun little confirmation for fans of the original.
Overall, if you don’t think about the injustice this movie did to the musical, the original movie, AND the sequel to the original, Mean Girls (2024) was an alright movie. The Black Friday commercial Walmart put out with Lindsey Lohan, Lacey Chabert, and Amanda Seyfried was a better modern version than whatever this was. I don’t regret the money I spent on XD tickets (despite the fact that Mean Girls is not a movie that requires moving seats like A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes might), but I’m not going to watch it again. Spare yourself the heartbreak and just watch Barbie for the fourth time.
