“Mean Girls,” released in 2004 and directed by Mark Waters, was based on the self-help book “Queen Bees and Wannabes” by Rosalind Wiseman. Written by Tina Fey, the film grossed over $129 million worldwide against a budget of $17 million. Its box office success, coupled with its subsequent popularity on home video and streaming platforms, contributed to its lasting cultural impact and cult status among audiences.

Mean Girls 2024

Raised by a single mother/research zoologist and homeschooled in the wilds of Africa, Cady Heron finds herself unprepared for what awaits her upon their return to the U.S.

1 Vacation

2 Shop

3 Amazon

Drawn into the exclusive circle of the school’s most elite clique, The Plastics, Cady quickly realizes that navigating high school is akin to traversing the Savanah. Overwhelmed by the allure of popularity and influence, Cady succumbs to temptation and ends up hurting those she holds dear.

Will she be able to find redemption in time for the Spring Formal?

Mean Girls 2024 is a love letter to fans of the original. Unlike most modern remakes, it neither disrespects the source material nor presents a soulless copy of its progenitor. Instead, it slaps a new coat of paint on it all, modernizing some areas and improving others. However, the most significant change is that this Mean Girls is an all-out musical. In point of fact, the ratio of song and dance to spoken dialogue may be enough to classify it as an operetta.

Filled with all of the beats that fans of the original loved (i.e., description of the cliques, Cady fawning over Aaron, the Christmas talent show, etc.), only with many of them transformed into song and dance numbers, Mean Girls jumps into the overly complex and emotional realm of female relationships with both feet.

Aided by some fairly well-crafted, if not dynamic, dialogue, Mean Girls will get you from A to B. Neither this nor the original version were particularly complicated stories, which isn’t necessarily necessary. Both movies rely on the characters and theme to keep audiences engaged, and this one has the added bonus of some well-done musical sequences.

Unfortunately, except for Regina’s theme song (more on her further down)/entrance and the Halloween song (again, a Regina piece), the musical numbers are well performed but otherwise generic and unmemorable. Audiences will tap their toes and bop along during each piece, but only the most musically inclined superfans will leave the theater able to remember any of the melodies well enough to hum them.

That said, the musical bits are the show’s saving grace, as many spoken dialogue scenes feel like interminably long obligatory afterthoughts, the only purpose of which is to get to the next song. However, Mean Girls 2024 does have one more thing going for it. While some of the performances are marginally better than that of the original (Angourie Rice is a superior actress to Lindsay Lohan), Reneé Rapp, who plays the wicked Regina George, shines brightest.

Aided by a fantastic set of pipes and the movie’s most dynamic tunes, Rapp is Regina George. Where Rachel McAdams gave a subtle and nuanced (relative to the material) performance, Rapp’s George is an apprentice-to-Maleficent showpony. She owns the character completely. Reneé knows she is playing someone larger than life with a personality big enough to dominate an entire city school, and she delivers.

With all of that said, this is beginning to sound like a glowing review, but it’s important to remember that this is all relative to the original, and both movies are dumb. Whether it’s the cartoonishly naive Cady who caves to peer pressure almost from the moment that she’s on-screen only to cave to peer pressure a few scenes later only to cave to peer pressure for the finale, the completely neutered school principal played well in the original and phoned in on this version by the usually reliable Tim Meadows, or the annoying-but-we-should-love-her-because-she’s-an-outsider Janis, both versions of Mean Girls are peopled with unlikeable characters and “teach” a banal and meaningless message: Be yourself and Girls should stick together.

WOKE ELEMENTS

Diverse Diversity that’s Diverse

• Mean Girls 2024 is set in a fairly metropolitan school, so the level of melanin diversity makes total sense.
  • However, that doesn’t mean they didn’t race-swap nearly half of the main cast.
    • That said, the black actor who plays Damian is an improvement.
  • The clique description scene has been truncated and sanitized for “modern audiences” and no longer shows people congregated by their race… because that never happens, right?

We’re Super. Thanks for Asking

• While homosexuality was undoubtedly present in the original, Mean Girls 2024 dyed its hair purple and bought some buttplugs.
  • In the clique intro scene, two dudes sloppy tongue kiss
  • A large number of the “kids” are either implicitly or explicitly gay.
  • Janis’s sexuality is a much more prevalent aspect of this film.

But Who Opens Her Jars

• In this version, Cady’s mom is single, and her dad is never mentioned.
  • Being a single mom isn’t necessarily woke, but since he was in the original and not even mentioned in this version, we’re assuming that he was removed from this version so that Cady’s mom could be a strong, independent woman.

Isn’t Regina Being “Herself?”

• The movie’s ultimate message is the common woke nonsense trope, “Just be yourself.” One of the movie’s biggest and most elaborate musical numbers revolves around this “revelation.”
  • Instead, why don’t we all try to be better than ourselves? A lot of people are awful.

It’s Ok. They’re Only Playing Children

• There’s a lot of cleavage and “boob” talk/singing going on, like a lot.
• There’s an entire song about modern feminism means dressing like a whore.
  • I think that it’s actually tongue-in-cheek, but the fact remains that the whore-clad actress only became an adult a few months before filming began and that the movie portrays all of them as sexualized children for the sake of humor.

The Leftovers

• There’s a random line dissing fracking that comes out of nowhere and sounds like Tina Fey practically taking the microphone for a minute.
• It’s followed by an equally random comment about redlining that might as well have also been right out of Fey’s mouth.
  • both of these were reminiscent of her character in A Haunting In Venice
• There’s that whole nonsense trust exercise scene, the heavy-handed message of which is “We, as women, have to learn to support one another.” blah, blah, blah.
  • Everyone should be kind to one another regardless of what’s between their legs. Why exactly is it imperative that women support other women? It’s silly and mildly sexist.
• The line: “People call me a b!t@h. You know what they’d call me if I was a man?” “Strong.”
  • No. We call those guys all kinds of names, none of which is strong. This is one of modern feminists’ favorite stupid lines to excuse horrible behavior.