Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Mean Girls’ on VOD, the Remake of a Comedy Classic (That’s Secretly A Musical)

It’s Mean Girls’ (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) turn to take the book-to-movie-to-Broadway-musical-to-movie-musical creative procession, and one can only wonder what the fifth step might be – AI virtual 3D interactive holograms, where YOU can play a Mean Girl? There really should be so many more ways to tell the exact same story! You likely know the story by now, how Tina Fey turned Rosalind Wiseman’s self-help book Queen Bees and Wannabes into the screenplay for 2004’s Mean Girls, which became a touchstone in the high-school-comedy subgenre, and then became a Broadway musical in 2018 with a book by Fey, which became a movie musical with a screenplay also by Fey. The new film was slated for a Paramount+ release, but instead was released theatrically during a dead-ass winter, grossing more than $100 million worldwide, and if you’re like me, made you wish you were watching the original movie instead. 

MEAN GIRLS (2024): STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: “You have to find your clique and commit to it.” Easier said than done, beeyotch. That’s the advice art-weirdo Janis (Auli’i Cravalho) gives Cady (Angourie Rice) on her first day. For years, Cady was home-schooled in a tent in Kenya by her researcher mother (Jenna Fischer). But now, she’s replaced lions and hippos with real predators: Suburban high-schoolers. Janis and her “almost too gay to function” bestie Damian (Jacquel Spivey) take pity on the new girl and give her the guided tour of the segregated lunchroom: Over here you have your horny band dweebs and over there the jocks and the grade-grubbers. And over there are the Plastics, led by Regina George (Renee Rapp, reprising the Broadway role), who’s forever flanked by toadie Gretchen (Bebe Wood) and dimwit Karen (Avantika), and makes a grand musical entrance that’s like a torch song directed at herself. 

Against the odds, Cady finds herself invited to lunch with the Plastics on a one-week trial basis, which puts her with one foot in the geek squad and one with the popular girls. Janis and Damian want her to spy on Regina, who everybody hates, not because she’s rich and fashionable and gorgeous and gets eeeevvvverrrrrythingggggg she wants, but because she’s rich and fashionable and gorgeous and gets eeeevvvverrrrrythingggggg she wants and totally acts like it. And Cady sort of tentatively agrees. She goes to Regina’s house, and her mother (Busy Philipps) greets her by saying, “We haven’t had any new meat in our old lady taco in so long!” Does that line make sense to anybody? Bueller? Bueller? Anyway. Regina and Gretchen and Karen have a Burn Book full of mean and hateful shit about the kids at school, which is the kind of highly incriminating thing that could cause a big problem in the third act, assuming the third act is up for it, which it almost certainly is.

Possibly to create convincing subterfuge, possibly due to peer pressure (Gretchen: “If you don’t dress sexy, then that’s slut-shaming us!”) and possibly because she kinda actually likes it, Cady starts adopting Plasticky fashion and behaviors. She sits behind Aaron (Christopher Briney) in calc class, and falls into a big pot of thick, coagulatey infatuation soup. I mean, she’s a math whiz, but she flunks the quizzes – much to the suspicion of calc teach Ms. Norbury (Fey, reprising the role from the first movie) – so she can get a little tutoring from Aaron. Problem is, he’s Regina’s ex, and if she can’t have him, no one can. Sensing the competition closing in, Regina wins him back, prompting Cady to sing the line, “I can’t even watch when she touches his hair, and I’ve watched a snake eat a cow.” Is a rivalry forming? Will this prompt Cady to concoct a revenge scheme with Janis and Damian? Will this be any different at all from the 2004 Mean Girls? NO SPOILERS, but you damn well know it won’t be.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Color Purple just got funneled through the same book-movie-Broadway-musical-movie conduit. Heathers became a musical, although not a musical-movie, but merely a mediocre filmed version of the stage production. And the John Hughes catalog is forever a touchstone, but that doesn’t mean anyone needs to turn Pretty in Pink into song and dance, thank you.

Performance Worth Watching: Although Rice is lightly charismatic as our protag (you’ll remember her as a young scene thief in The Good Guys), and Rapp nicely encapsulates the nasty vampiness of the queen of mean, I enjoyed Cravalho’s performance the best, playing the shrewd and likable outsider with the best set of pipes in the production.

Memorable Dialogue: That is so self-referential:

Gretchen: That is so fetch.

Regina: What is “fetch”?

Gretchen: It’s like slang from an old movie. Juno, I think.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: In updating Mean Girls for the 2020s, of course Fey and co. had to incorporate social media, but it’s not a key plot element, since that would require too much of a rewrite, which obviously didn’t happen. The lines you know and love are all but untouched; the script is pretty much the same as the original film, albeit embellished with songs that are lyrically amusing but musically unremarkable. You’ll laugh, but only because you laughed before. You might sing, but only if you put in the effort to dig in and fully commit. 

I’m left indifferent by this musical – its assets are almost exclusively familiarities. The performances are endearing, but younger-model facsimiles of the characters we already know. The centerpiece number, “Revenge Party,” shows some inspired visual dynamics via long takes, but other musical sequences lack pizzazz and a sense of scale, indicative of its origin as a small-screen release. Where the original, with its wise-wiseass borderline-satirical tone, tapped into some truths about the Great Adolescent Struggle, this regurgitation fails to recognize how American life has changed since 2004 beyond superficialities; the smartphones in everyone’s hands are props, not problems. What we have here is a classic instance of a movie that struggles mightily to justify its existence.  

Our Call: Diehard Plastics fans might want to wait for Mean Girls to graduate from the pricey paid-streaming tier before they satiate their curiosity. As for the rest of us? SKIP IT and fetch the original.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.