Reviewed by Colin Jacobson (April 28, 2024)
Back in 2004, Mean Girls didn’t dominate at the box office. It pulled in $130 million worldwide and landed in 28th place on the US chart for the year.
However, the film enjoyed a strong cult following, and it also leapt to the stage via a musical adaptation in 2017. That version gets a big-screen rendition via this 2024 cinematic update.
Previously home-schooled while her family lived in Africa as researchers, 16-year-old Cady Heron (Angourie Rice) starts her first day of public school in the US. This falls into the “rude awakening” category as she goes into the hard-edged world of suburban teens.
Despite some surly reactions to her, Cady quickly befriends a pair of outcasts: Goth girl Janis 'Imi'ike (Auli'i Cravalho) and gay Damian Hubbard (Jaquel Spivey). They show her the ropes and she learns about the various cliques, one of which they call “The Plastics”.
Referred to as “teen royalty”, that small clan consists of dim-witted Karen Shetty (Avantika), wealthy gossip Gretchen Wieners (Bebe Wood), and the leader, imperious blonde Regina George (Reneé Rapp).
After Regina helps defuse a situation in which an obnoxious boy teases Cady, the head Plastic invites our new girl to sit with them for the rest of the week. Janis encourages this so Cady can report back what she learns of group’s inner workings.
A complication arises when Cady meets hunky Aaron Samuels (Christopher Briney) in her math class. She falls for him but soon learns that he used to date Regina, which makes him off-limits.
Essentially the movie follows the various interrelationships and how they become even more complicated. Initially naïve, Cady watches the ways that Regina and the other girls undermine each other. At first she sits in their circle as an observer, but she slowly starts to turn into one of them.
Matters get even messier when Regina stabs Cady in the back, which then prompts Janis - who has Regina-related bitterness of her own - to push their side into a calculated plan to ruin Regina’s life. The film tracks their progress and the deepening conflicts.
Yes, that synopsis comes straight from my review of the 2004 movie. The two offer literally identical plots so why reinvent that particular wheel?
I went into the 2024 Girls with misgivings, some of which stemmed from the closeness of their narratives and characters. Heck, Tina Fey wrote both, so the remake didn’t even come with an alternate perspective.
In addition, the decision to make the 2024 Girls a musical acted as a strike against it – for me, at least. After 25 years and 10,000-plus reviews, regular readers of this site know that I don’t count myself as a fan of that format.
Nothing about the 2004 Girls led me to view this project as a natural choice to get the song-‘n’-dance treatment. Could the 2024 film overcome these negatives?
Yeah. To my immense surprise, the updated Girls becomes a wholly satisfying version of the story and actually fares better than the original.
While the 2004 film comes with some fun moments – and plenty of quotable lines – it just doesn’t completely click. Prior to the original flick, Fey’s writing experience all came from SNL sketches, so the leap to a feature film script seemed like a big one.
To my surprise, it turns out the two Girls films remain Fey’s only theatrical screenplays. However, she got a lot more experience with writing that followed stories via her years on 30 Rock.
Fey also acted in a bunch of movies after the 2004 Girls. Prior to that flick, she’d appeared in only one feature, and in a bit part at that.
Though she didn’t write screenplays for the various films in which she acted between 2004 and 2024, one assumes the basic experience rubbed off on her. This means that Fey circa 2023 almost certainly enjoyed a better grasp of screenplays than the Fey of 2003, and it shows.
This makes the 2024 edition a more coherent and better-executed narrative. Fey simply seems like a more self-confident writer here, so even though the two follow the same paths, the 2024 flick comes across as tighter and more fluid.
Despite my general disdain for musicals, the film integrates these sequences well, and they add a surreal nature than suits the story. The 2004 Girls existed as a satirical piece that didn’t attempt literal realism, and that allows it to translate to the fantasy world of musicals well.
Given the “heightened reality” of the story, the moments characters slip into songs feels more natural. The tunes themselves tend to seem fairly catchy as well, which helps, and they accentuate the narrative.
Though the 2024 film hews closely to the plot and character development of the prior flick, that doesn’t mean it turns into a carbon copy. Indeed, my back-to-back viewing of the pair revealed many more changes than I anticipated.
I don’t quite get why the 2024 Girls loses Cady’s father from the original, I admit. This doesn’t become an issue, but it still doesn’t seem necessary in the structure of the film.
I do appreciate that the update refrains from relentless callbacks to the 2004 movie, though. Fey and company likely felt tempted to play the Nostalgia Card and just regurgitate the same meme-worthy bits from the original.
And that do indulge in this choice at times, so I won’t claim the 2024 Girls includes only fresh dialogue. Nonetheless, the heavy majority of the material and jokes comes new to the remake, so we get far fewer callbacks than I anticipated.
Though both deal with the brutal world of teen cliques and rivalries, the 2024 Girls tends to feel a little kinder ‘n’ gentler, and in a good way. Both follow the same paths but 2024 just feels a bit warmer and more emotional at the end.
Take Rapp’s Regina versus Rachel McAdams’. While the latter just seems casually and willfully cruel, Rapp’s comes across as more simply imperious and condescending.
In other words, the 2004 Regina seemed to enjoy her nastiness more. Not that Rapp’s Regina feels like a benign figure – not at all – but she gives the role a certain regal feel that makes Regina less loathsome, a choice that then more easily allows us to swallow her rehabilitation by the film’s end.
All of this leaves us with a surprisingly solid remake. The 2024 Mean Girls takes the positives from the original and improves on them to become a highly satisfying version of the tale.
Footnote: more footage of the Spring Fling shows up at the launch of the end credits. A brief but cute tag pops up when the text concludes as well.
