Review: 'Mean Girls' loses its bite in a whole lotta bark

Modern classic Mean Girls returns in musical form to the big screen after a hit Broadway run. So fetch.

Mean Girls, the movie based on the musical based on the movie, doesn’t do much to convince us why it exists. While it does its best to update the story for a chronically online Gen Z audience, it never feels much more than a fresh coat of paint on a perfectly good wall. While the musical numbers are fetch (yes, it’s happening!) and show stopping performances, particularly by Auliʻi Cravalho and Jacquel Spivey as Janis and Damian, keep the movie a fun time it isn’t the instant classic of the original plastics. You can’t sit with us.

Mean Girls is in theaters now. It will premiere on Paramount+ later this year.

To talk about Mean Girls, the new movie based on the Broadway stage musical based on the 2004 movie of the same name, we have to talk about the Great White Way’s recent obsession with movie-to-musical adaptations. We’ve been moving towards a world where billionaire studio executives see existing intellectual property as an untapped goldmine. And while movie remakes / reboots / requels (looking at your Halloween and Scream) are typically hit-or-miss with varying excuses for their existence, stage musicals haven’t quite come to the same realization – speaking exclusively of non-musical movies becoming stage musicals. There are past exceptions, of course, like Legally Blonde or Grey Gardens, but the modern state of the genre — Back to the Future, New York, New York — is grim.

Mean Girls the musical is a perfect example. It takes a beloved property that is already nearly as stylized as a musical and simply overlays songs on top of its key moments.

If you’ve somehow missed out on the original, the story follows Cady Heron (Angourie Rice), North Shore High School’s newest student who has returned to the States after being homeschooled in South Africa. What she discovers is high school is perhaps wilder than the savanna. Art freaks / “too gay to function” dynamic duo Janis (Auli’i Cravalho) and Damien (Jacquel Spivey) take Cady under their wing just for her to catch the eye of the school’s popular clique “The Plastics” consisting of aloof Gretchen (Bebe Wood), airhead Karen (Avantika) and queen bee Regina George (Renee Rapp).

But when Cady’s crush on Regina’s ex-boyfriend Aaron Samuels (Christopher Briney) gets out, a war of gossip, crushes and buses ensues.

To justify the existence of songs in the universe, directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. stage many as fantasy sequences taking place in the mind of characters. Some of these sequences are incredibly effective. Janis (Auli’i Cravalho) and Damien’s (Jacquel Spivey) “Revenge Party” is staged as a pastel-splashed revenge montage and Regina George’s “Someone Gets Hurt” is turned into a dark, twisted party anthem that feel true to the nature of a movie musical. Others like “Stupid with Love” feel more contrived.

In adapting the movie to a musical and back into a movie, Tina Fey, who penned all three versions of the story, had to sacrifice some of the impact of the original’s best moments to fit in the musical moments.

For example, Regina’s iconic “get in loser” line comes as the button of a song feels like an afterthought and Damien’s “you go, Glen Coco” gets lost in the shuffle of a musical montage. Other lines like “stop trying to make fetch happen” don’t feel as natural in the brighter more positive movie musical than the original. In adding music to Mean Girls, it also loses some of its bite.

While the original movie wasn’t exactly complex, the characters felt like lived in specimens with a life before the we pick up the story and one that continues after. Perhaps it’s the innate dissonance you get when translating something for the stage onto screen, but I think there’s something more afoot. Mean Girls the movie the musical the movie feels more like a list of plot points rather than a full story. It leans too heavily on your prior knowledge of the plot and the characters. It’s no wonder that the most rewarding moments are the ones where we get to see characters like Cravalho’s Janis, Spivey’s Damien or Wood’s Gretchen step outside the bounds of the original story.

On the other hand, characters like Cady and Regina feel like they are too closely chained to the original while striving to become something new — a tension that results in an uneven performances.

While a skilled musical tactician like Rapp is able to find her moments — her performance of Regina’s soliloquy “Watch the World Burn” is standing ovation worthy — Rice gets lost.

Is there a way to bring Mean Girls to a new generation? Perhaps. Social media, TikTok, viral trends and Gen Z lingo are abound in the movie. But it never feels more than a whole lot of unnecessary business piled on top of a perfectly good story. Even the brightest moments feel fleeting. The original was subversive and ahead-of-its-time. This already feels dated. If you’re looking for the Mean Girls for a new generation, just watch Bottoms.

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Hey! I’m Karl. You can find me on Twitter here. I’m also a Tomatometer-approved critic.

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Karl Delossantos

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Hey, I'm Karl, founder and film critic at Smash Cut. I started Smash Cut in 2014 to share my love of movies and give a perspective I haven't yet seen represented. I'm also an editor at The New York Times, a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.