Mean Girls (2024)

PG-13 for language, suggestive behavior and comments on sexuality, teenage drinking, and general overall cruelty.  Like, it feels more offensive than it actually is.  (And for some, it probably isn't offensive at all.)  It's a movie that both glorifies and chides teenage drama and stereotypes.  It's probably not appropriate for the very young.  Also, while I do believe that elements of Mean Girls is representative of high school culture, it doesn't really give a lot of nuance to social elements. 

DIRECTORS: Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez, Jr.

Yeah, out of all of the photos that I found from the new Mean Girls musical, I chose an image of Tina Fey as an AP Calc teacher.  What?  I like Tina Fey and every other photo made me feel like a creeper.  Also, the more I look at that photo, the more I question the effectiveness of that board.  I'm one of those teachers who fought to keep my chalkboard, but I'm also aware of chalkboard real estate.  Where is she doing any work on that board?  Don't waste perfectly good space with posters on a board!  What is that?  Anyway.

The past few (maybe just two) are going to be blogs about paradoxes.  Again, two things are true for me.  1) I hate when movies become Broadway shows for the most part.  2) I will absolutely watch those things and don't understand the fear that people have about watching musicals.  The first point I want to explain first.  If someone handed me tickets to Back to the Future: The Musical, I would gleefully run to see it.  But that being said, it seems kind of...disappointing.  I want new content.  I don't want the old content with songs.  Part of it always feels like going to Disney World or something and seeing a staged production of one the animated classics.  It's fun and all, but I rarely am satisfied.  I don't feel like I've grown at all.  Instead, I want something that makes me think.  Instead, I kind of get to see how they adapted things that I already know about.  The entire time, I'm just waiting for Regina George get hit by a bus.

I suppose for the die hard fans of something, it could be fascinating to see another interpretation of something that is so beloved.  Now, I'm one of the suckers who went to see Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark on Broadway.  I didn't go to New York to see it.  We were in New York and that's the show that I wanted to see, despite the abysmal reviews.  Now, maybe I took my disappointment from that absolute trainwreck of a musical and applied it to all future musical adaptations of films.  (I get it.  "Spider-Man" is more of an IP than it is a movie adaptation.  You know where I'm going with this.  Stop being so ornery.) But I'm a guy who loves Spider-Man.  I thought it would be really neat to see Spider-Man fly through the air, despite all of the stuntman deaths.  It's just that I was more disappointed than someone who came in just to see a musical.  So who is Mean Girls the musical for?

Musical nerds.  Don't get me wrong.  That's a bigger demographic than die hard Mean Girls fans.  (By the way, I'm going back and forth on this one.  Should I have rewatched the 2004 Mean Girls before watching the musical or did I get the better experience forgetting a lot of the jokes of the film?) 2004's Mean Girls is an amazing movie that I've only seen once.  Trust me. There are a lot of movies that I've only seen once. The Mean Girls musical movie is...okay.  That sounds like I really didn't like it.  (I mean, the word is "okay".  It should be pretty clear, but I already read my tone as being dismissive.)  I think there's something incredibly fun about movie musicals for the most part.  I mean, that's not absolute.  I still don't really like The Producers movie musical.  In terms of hitting all of the spectacle and catchy tunes that a movie musical should, it nails it.  The performances are great.  The style and the flair are pretty darned good.  I'll even go as far as to say that some of the songs add some depth to the characters.  I'll give extra points to Cady's songs, which help her character quite a bit.  Cady's entire personality before meeting the plastics is one of silence.  She wants to blend into the background.  Mostly, intentional silence does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to character development.  But since musical songs tend to be non-diagetic, she's allowed to say a bunch of stuff that just directly characterizes her.

Since it is so effective with musical nerds, what is the problem?  Honestly, not much if you just want a good time.  It's just that adding a movie that stands really well on its own and then committing a lot of it to a musical, something gets lost in terms of being a classic.  I remember that the reviews for the newer Mean Girls movie musical were not exactly spectacular.  I can see why.  Mean Girls, for all of the showmanship, loses a lot of the punch that the original one had.  I keep going back to this image in these blogs, so I apologize.  There's something a little punk rock about the original Mean Girls.  It took the aesthetics of Disney Channel teen comedies and said something completely subversive.  That's something that Tina Fey and Robert Carlock were really good at.  They smiled while delivering these gut punches.  But 2024's Mean Girls feels like eating candy a lot of the time.  It's a tribute show to when things were a little bit more raw.  The characters feel like they are setting up for these punchlines instead of actually being cutting.  Regina George, while Queen Bee of the original movie, is larger than life.  I guess she's supposed to be, but I don't know how much of that is earned.

One thing I also have a harder time grasping onto is who Regina George as a character is.  I know.  I'm poo-pooing complexity here.  But this Regina George often feels inconsistent.  There are times that she sees, and almost envies, Cady's vulnerability.  But then there are other times that she is a cat playing with a dead mouse.  Partly, this comes from Regina's back story with Janis, an attempt to reclaim one's innocence.  Now, I would love if this was the filmmakers' intentions, but I really just get the vibe that Regina George kind of just becomes what the musical needs her to be.  Don't get me wrong. One of the key concepts of the story is that stereotypes are humanized and, as much as Cady is the hero of the piece, her manipulation of the Plastics inverts the norms of good versus evil.  But this movie doesn't really hit that with any degree of nuance. It's a sledgehammer.  

Maybe there's something to criticize about the main story itself.  Again, I think that the original, for my limited memory of the film, is kind of amazing.  But one thing that the movie really revels in is the idea that, even though villains are villainous, they are human first and foremost.  But one thing that is pretty consistent is that, even though we get to see what made Regina Regina, she is still pretty unlikable.  Like, even in that tender moment when she claims that she's medicated to wazoo, she's still a pretty hateful person.  I'm all over the place with concessions though.  That's true about real life.  We can humanize jerks all day.  They tend to still be jerks, even when they're trying not to be jerks.

Performance wise, it almost all works.  I feel so bad for Busy Phillips though.  Busy Phillips is talented, but she's really in someone else's shadow with this one.  With the other obvious recasting in this movie, the actors are bringing something new to the role because they have to sing.  There's a nice deliniation between the performances where it is hard to compare apples and oranges.  But Mrs. George...has nothing new to add to the character.  She's doing an Amy Poehler impression the entire time.  And Amy Poehler nailed that role so hard that no one could really do much with it besides an impression.  Golly, it's hard to really watch those scenes because that was one person's performance and she's not in this movie. (Although she totally could be.) 

I guess it works.  It just doesn't really stick to the ribs.  It's a movie that I'm already forgetting because I just didn't invest that much in it.  It made me chuckle.  Auli'i Cravalho and Jaquel Spivey absolutely steal the film from everyone else.  They're scenes are what make the movie worth watching.  But the rest of the movie is...fine.