Alex Wheeler Movie Ops

Let’s get one thing clear: any complaints about recycling Mean Girls in 2024 is disingenuous. Culture is and has always been recycled, with the bulk of our stories being resuscitations, revivals, and references. What most people consider the original iteration of Mean Girls – the incisive and hilarious 2004 movie – was itself based on the book Queen Bees and Wannabes. Now, many reworkings later, the Broadway musical based on the 2004 movie has been adapted into a movie musical. So no, Mean Girls 2024 is no more of a recycled product than many of the movies you see today, and it’s wrong to dismiss it for only that reason.

The central question when evaluating it and all other refurbished stories is whether it twists the material enough to avoid staleness. The musical aspect of Mean Girls 2024 certainly distinguishes it, pushing the already arch source material into even more unreal territory. There’s also an effort to rectify the original’s very white take on teenage girlhood and its unsteady steps toward queer representation. 

On top of all that, Mean Girls is still an anomaly. There’s only been a handful of intelligent, popular takes on teenage girls, a fact that gets a sly joke in the 2024 version through a reference to Juno. The core of Mean Girls is still a delight; its truths are sharp but easily digestible, absurd and grounded, a tonal mix that balances on a razor’s edge.

2004’s Mean Girls stood without wobbling, a feat that still feels like a miracle, especially in comparison to the less steady iteration of Mean Girls 2024.

Whether you have a taste for musicals or not, they certainly eat up time. The pacing has inevitably changed, even as the story itself remains the same: Cady attends an American high school for the first time and loses herself in its labyrinthine social structure. The 2004 version was a crisp 97 minutes. The musical adds an extra 15 minutes and still cuts out minor events and wrinkles. It’s a move that leaves the film feeling less full of ideas than its predecessor, a minor degradation instead of solidifying, and one that could have been avoided if the songs were sharper.

Too many of the songs are repetitious in content and style. Most exist to make a single point, particularly in the film’s setup where whole songs are character introductions. These people are, purposefully, not complicated. The point of Mean Girls is that most of them are operating as shells of themselves, manicured versions that fit into recognizable roles. Explaining those people through song means spending way too much time with their manufactured personas. Less time is given in the musical to their facades’ cracks, which not only makes these characters less interesting, it also removes much of the supporting structure for the film’s finale.

This is almost made up for by one of the film’s best numbers, I’d Rather Be Me. It’s belted by Auli’i Cravalho as Janis, a character changed from a white, accused lesbian to a queer person of color, and the song is defiantly about exactly what the title says. Cravalho has already given us one of Disney’s best ‘I Want’ songs in Moana’s How Far I’ll Go, so it’s no surprise she milks her big song in Mean Girls for all it’s worth. But like so many of the changes in the musical, she has to work extra hard to fill in holes created by the musical’s changes. The social structure of the high school and how the characters fit into it is structurally unchanged, and yet the characters are quite changed. Cravalho’s Janis is a perfect example. By doing this, the film is seemingly ignoring the way queerness and race inform all social structures in America, including that of teenage girls, and it makes the inclusion feel hollow.

Even outside of content, the musical numbers drag down the film’s style. 2004’s Mean Girls has a surrealist edge, cheaply done with tweaks to costume and production design. 2024’s musical version requires much more overt and frequent breaks from reality, and while there are hints of production elements to support this, they weren’t captured in the frame. Many of the musical numbers are shot too tightly, with a flurry of activity occurring at their edges. I constantly wanted to see farther out to appreciate the choreography of its larger numbers and to feel a song’s full mood, but I was trapped within the restriction applied by directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. It’s deeply frustrating, just one more element that causes the musical to teeter on its knife’s edge.

But Mean Girls never falls. The story’s core intelligence and humor are retained, even as its twists do more to throw it off balance than steady it.

Release: Available now in theaters
Director: Samantha Jayne, Arturo Perez Jr.
Writers: Tina Fey
Cast: Angourie Rice, Reneé Rapp, Auli’i Cravalho, Jaquel Spivey, Avantika, Bebe Wood, Christopher Briney