Jason Bailey
It’s a slippery slope, anytime you start talking about whether a movie “needs to exist”; strictly speaking, no movie needs to exist. (Well, The Thin Blue Line saved a guy’s life. It needed to exist. But you get what I’m saying.) Yet few films in recent memory have seemed as utterly unnecessary as Mean Girls, the new musical remake of the delightful Tina Fey-penned comedy, itself just barely twenty years old. This is one of those Hairspray situations, in which a hit movie was adapted into a Broadway musical (since Broadway producers will only spend their money on properties people are already familiar with), and was enough of a success to warrant said musical adaptation being turned back into a movie (since Hollywood studios will only spend their money on properties people are already familiar with).
It’s a semi-depressing IP circle jerk, less a movie than a filmed deal, so I suppose the lede here should be that Mean Girls 2.0 isn’t bad. It’s energetic, the performers are capable and charismatic, and Fey’s script still has plenty of juice. But again, that’s part of the problem; it’s not like the 2004 film doesn’t still play (and if you don’t believe me, go to any of the many revival screenings it still fills), so all you’re getting here is an elaborate cosplay, in which the only noteworthy additions are forgettable songs and social media montages.
As before, our focus is on Cady (Angourie Rice, looking approximately three weeks older than she did in The Nice Guys seven years ago), entering public school for the first time as a junior after 12 years of homeschooling abroad. She has barely begun navigating the various intertwining cliques of high school, under the tutelage of artsy Janis (Auliʻi Cravalho) and Damian (Jaquel Spivey) when she is adopted by the “Plastics,” led by “queen bee” Regina George (Reneé Rapp); at Janis’s urging, she infiltrates the clique, only to become just as nasty and manipulative as Regina herself. Complications ensue, and so on.
Fey’s new script sticks pretty close to her original, with a few quotable new lines (when Cady shows up to the Halloween party in her horrifying, rather than provocative, costume, Gretchen scolds her, “Cady, if you don’t dress slutty, you’re slut-shaming us”). She does, however, indulge in too many too-cute in-jokes; I would encourage anyone who doesn’t fully understand “fan service” to observe the moment in which Lindsay Lohan, cameoing as the moderator of the Mathletes competition, announces, “This has only happened once before!”
The main draw here are the performers. Rice is as likable as ever, and boasts a fine (if modest) singing voice. Rapp, who took over the role of Regina midway through the stage run, is an old-school Broadway belter, and has a blast with the role. Bebe Wood and Avantika, as (respectively) Gretchen and Karen, are frequently funny without resorting to imitation.
But the revelation here is Cravalho, whom younger viewers will know primarily as the voice of Moana; she’s terrific, charismatic and fierce, and a hell of a singer to boot. In the “grown-up” role, Busy Phillips is hysterical as Regina’s mom, and Jon Hamm gets a great little character bit, though neither Fey nor Tim Meadows come up with much of anything new in reprising their roles from the original.
And that, unfortunately, goes for the musical additions as well. Part of the problem is inconsistency; Fey doesn’t appear to have really worked through how to best add music to this story, so some of the numbers are organic (like a performative phone recording of the first song, “Cautionary Tale”), some are traditionally, spontaneous, break-into-song situations, and some are cleverly conceived little breakouts, like the flashbacks and fantasies on 30 Rock. But the bigger issue is that the songs, carried over from the stage version, simply aren’t terribly good or memorable. There are occasional witty lyrics (“This is modern feminism talkin’ / I expect to run the world in shoes I cannot walk in”), and even a number or two that’s genuinely funny (the switch from “Jingle Bell Rock” to a new number, an amusingly explicit holiday jam called “Rockin’ Around the Pole,” is one of the few places where a change is an improvement).
But the serious numbers, like Regina’s confessional power ballad, are far less successful, and a glance at the credits indicates what the problem may have been: the music is by one Jeff Richmond, who appears to have landed the gig based less on his musical acumen than because he’s Tina Fey’s husband. Richmond did incidental music for 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and did it well, but that’s quite a different skill set from musical theatre composition.
The direction, by first-timers Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr., is energetic and occasionally inventive (mostly in their reality-bending “musical theatre” staging, primarily how they move from one setting to another), and some of the flashy moments stick. Again, it’s not that Mean Girls is a waste of time; it’s a pleasant enough way to pass a couple of hours on a snowy afternoon. But I walked in uncertain of its necessity, and walked out unconvinced otherwise.
B-
“Mean Girls” is in theaters Friday.
