Film Review: "Mean Girls" and the Triumph of Reneé Rapp
This new iteration of the story may not be a great movie musical, but thanks to Rapp it's still a hell of a lot of fun.
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Warning: Spoilers follow!
I have a shameful confession to make. I am one of those Millennial Gays who, for some reason, never managed to watch Mean Girls, neither when it came out in 2004 nor in the two decades since, as it has become one of those cultural and generational touchstones, immortalized in dozens (if not hundreds) of memes which have been and remain in broad circulation. Rest assured, I fixed that last week, both because I thought it was high time I got caught up and because I wanted to get some context before I saw the new musical film. I found it to be the perfect time capsule of the early 2000s, in all of their beauty and ugliness.
All of which brings me to the 2024 musical film, which has many of the same beats as its predecessor but, thankfully, excises some of the original’s unfortunate excesses. Angourie Rice portrays Cady Heron who, after a life spent being homeschooled by her mother in Kenya, returns to the States and starts attending North Shore High School, where she finds herself caught up in the cliquey atmosphere of the school, with her two friends, Janis 'Imi'ike and flamboyantly gay Damian Hubbard one side and the narcissistic and vain Plastics–comprised of Regina George, Karen Shetty, and Gretchen Wieners–on the other. Predictable escalation and hijinks ensue. By the end of the film everyone has learned a valuable lesson about the perils of mean-spiritedness.
I’m not sure that I’d go so far as to say that Mean Girls is a great movie musical, or even a particularly good one. What it is, however, is a whole lot of fun. It never takes itself too seriously, the story is light on its feet, and there are some truly remarkable performances. Rice is a perfectly acceptable Cady, though she lacks the sort of incandescent charisma that Lindsay Lohan was so capable of showing at the height of her career. Auliʻi Cravalho, however, is radiant as Janis 'Imi'ike, a social outcast who has her own ugly past with Regina (one that is far more convincing, and traumatic) than in the original film, and Jaquel Spivey is likewise perfectly cast as the too-gay-to-function Damian. The Plastics are likewise mostly strong, though Avantika is a bit too try-hardy as Karen. Bebe Wood, however, is very good as Gretchen, capturing a young woman struggling with her own issues even as she finds herself under the waspish heel of Regina.
Much of the film’s success, however, rests on the buxom shoulders of Reneé Rapp, who of course plays the malicious and domineering Regina George. There’s an effortlessness to Rapp’s performance that is truly stunning to watch, whether she is strutting purposefully across the cafeteria, delivering a dark and croony song like “Someone Gets Hurt” (possibly my favorite number), or sowing chaos while singing about how much she wants to make the “World Burn.” A friend of mine on Twitter remarked that watching Rapp is like watching a star be born right before our eyes, which makes the singer’s decision to focus more on her music all the more tragic.
Storywise Mean Girls hits all of the expected parts of the story, while thankfully excluding others. Viewers will recall that in the 2004 version the coach/health teacher was notorious for having affairs with students which was a very gross and unpleasant storyline at the time and has only become more egregious since. Thankfully, that whole storyline has been completely excised, though Jon Hamm does make a very humorous cameo as Coach Carr (I personally would have liked to see more of him). Tina Fey and Tim Meadows are of course excellent, somehow managing to look almost unchanged since they appeared in the 2004 version. And, of course, there’s also a lovely little cameo for Lohan herself, who appears as the judge at the mathematics competition.
Where it stumbles a bit is in the editing. As many other critics and viewers have pointed out, for being a musical Mean Girls doesn’t seem to want to pay much attention–and doesn’t want us to pay much attention–to the choreography and other spectacular elements. Indeed, it’s a rather staid film when it comes to the staging of the numbers, and there are too many quick cuts that keep us from being able to enjoy the simple spectacle of the body in motion. One can’t help but wonder whether the directors have ever actually seen another movie musical, or whether they just assume that people sign up for the singing and nothing else.
There are some exceptions to this, of course. The number “Revenge Party” is one of the visual high points of the film, filled with rainbow colors and ecstatic antics as Janis and Damian illuminate for Cady the benefits of seeking out revenge on those who have wronged them. Again, though, the real musical highlights are Regina’s aforementioned numbers “Someone Gets Hurt” and “World Burn.” The former is a literal showstopper as Regina luxuriates in the possibility of destroying Cady, all while the earnest Aaron (a thoroughly okay Christopher Briney) looks on powerlessly. It’s delicious and sinful and decadent; in short, it’s amazing. “World Burn” is, likewise, an opportunity for Regina to lean in to her inner darkness and become the unhinged and cunning mean girl she’s always been. If more of the numbers had been like these, I think the film overall would have been a better effort.
Overall, I found myself caught up in Mean Girls’ powerful and propulsive energy. It’s the kind of film that quite simply invites the viewer to have fun. While it might eschew some of the visual elements that were once associated with the movie musical–and while it might lean a little too hard on the auto-tuning (an unfortunate flaw of many Hollywood films featuring people who aren’t trained singers)--it does nevertheless capture enough of the utopian power of the musical genre and the lingering appeal of the original film to be more than entertaining. And sometimes, dear reader, that’s enough.