‘Mean Girls’ (2024): Shein-ifying a Classic

A Totally Reel Review

Rate It Out of Eight:

3/8

New year, new remake. I love Mean Girls (2004). It’s quotable, funny, relatable, and yes some jokes haven’t aged too well in the 20 years since it was released, but at least the movie took risks. Unfortunately that’s not the case with Mean Girls (2024). The new Mean Girls feels like the Shein version of the original: a cheap knockoff that tries too hard to imitate. The challenge with remakes/adaptations is staying true to the essence of the source while still adding something new. But iconic lines from the original movie have either been sanitized or are delivered with such lackluster performances that they fall flat.

Before I dive in further, I am genuinely curious who the target audience for this movie is. Is this movie meant to cash in on millennial nostalgia? Or is it trying to introduce Mean Girls to a new generation? If it’s the former, then maybe don’t say “Not your mother’s Mean Girls” in the trailer and remind every woman of their age. If it’s the latter, no offense to Tina Fey, but you can’t just add a bunch of TikTok influencer jump scares (sorry, I meant cameos) and call it a day. And if this movie is supposed to bring the Broadway musical to a larger audience… well it doesn’t do that particularly well either.

Taking the Mean out of Mean Girls

While I can nitpick all the individual changes to the script, everything boils down to two main complaints. First, Regina George isn’t mean enough. The plot of the movie is driving on the fact that Regina George is unlikeable — she’s manipulative, unremorseful, and wields power as a weapon. Rachel McAdams nailed the two-faced back-stabbing smile to a tee. A great example from the first movie is how she’d compliment someone’s skirt and how she loves that it’s vintage, then turns to Lindsay and says “that is the ugliest effing skirt I’ve ever seen.” Gretchen’s rant comparing Regina to Caesar sums up the character perfectly. Unfortunately these fake niceties is something a lot of girls do experience, which makes it that much easier to hate Regina.

In this movie, however, Renee Rapp’s Regina is only mildly mean. She’s awful to Gretchen, constantly snapping at her. But the worst she ever really did was give Cady high heels to secretly make fun of her. Or maybe she’ll tell you to stop lowering your voice to try to impress girls in the school cafeteria, but that behavior is just teenage girls being mean. Regina was a mean girl with a lowercase m, but she wasn’t capital M “Mean” like in the original. In the 2004 version, we see the four-way phone calls and how Regina insults the Plastics and made Gretchen so insecure about everything she did. In this movie she’s mostly just grumpy because she’s gaining weight and has a pimple. That’s hardly comparable to calling a girl’s mom and pretending to be Planned Parenthood. Why are we making a movie called Mean Girls but afraid to show manipulative and borderline cruel treatment?

I keep stressing this point because the entire plot of the movie and Cady’s arc hinges on the audience hating Regina. We are supposed to root for her downfall, only to realize that Cady replaced one mean girl with another. Cady’s change then drives home the moral of the movie, which is that people aren’t inherently mean, sometimes social pressures push people to say or do awful things to each other.

But if Regina isn’t that bad, then she doesn’t really deserve what Cady is doing to her. In fact, Cady comes off as psychotic in the new movie because we’re not rooting for Regina’s downfall to the same extent. There was a change later in the movie when Tina Fey asks people to raise their hand if a girl has ever said anything bad about you behind your back — rather than raising your hand if you have been personally victimized by Regina George. The original line showed just how widespread Regina’s reign of terror was, but the new version softens that impact to be about any girl who’s ever been mean. Sure it reinforces the moral that nobody is blameless, but the original movie worked because it focused on the competition between two girls, not an entire school.

Subpar Acting for a Subpar Musical

Sometimes a great performance can distract from how poorly written a script is, but in this case the performances made the writing problems glaringly obvious. To start, I can’t tell if Angourie Rice was just not the right actress for the role or if she was given bad instructions from the director. She didn’t have any chemistry with Christopher Briney (more on him later) and was honestly overpowered by Renee Rapp in regards to both her acting and singing. Sure it’s pretty hard to sing “I am filled with calcu-lust” with a straight face, but musicals can be so much fun if the director leaned into it fully. I haven’t seen the Broadway show, but apparently Stupid with Love was much more upbeat and dorky, which fit her character (comparison here).

Speaking of, some of the lyrics were… questionable. I can see that perhaps they’d work on the stage with a live audience, but hearing Regina sing “this whole school humps my leg like a chihuahua” on a giant screen wasn’t on my bingo card for 2024. Or telling us “My name is Regina George and I am a massive deal” doesn’t add to the movie. I’m not convinced she’s a big deal if she tells me, I need to see for myself how people revere her. This movie had potential to be a fun, upbeat twist on the original, but the song choices and placements sometimes feel awkward.

I also didn’t love Renee Rapp the first time I watched this (yes I unfortunately saw this twice), but she’s grown on me. For all the reasons I’ve mentioned before, I think Renee actually did a great job with what she was given and brought a different interpretation of Regina to life. I do want to acknowledge that the “do you know what they’d call me if I were a boy” joke was genuinely pretty funny. One of the few minor complaints I have of the original is that it felt like Regina didn’t get much closure. We see her hit by a bus, pick up lacrosse, and then just move on. In this movie, it was nice that she got one last one-on-one moment with Cady, even if she was high as a kite on pain meds.

As for the rest of the cast, I thought Auliʻi Cravalho, Jaquel Spivey, and Bebe Wood were all pretty good. Avantika Vandanapu was funny but they made Karen a little too dumb and just a sexy face (not a big fan of the song). I miss Amanda’s Seyfried telling us there’s a 30% chance it’s already raining. But my biggest complaint is that I really did not like Christopher Briney as Aaron Samuels. He’s just so flat and uncharismatic. You’re telling me that not one, but two girls are fighting for his attention? Even in the original movie, Aaron Samuels is written the way a lot of women are in movies — to serve purely as the love interest. But at least Lindsay Lohan and Jonathan Bennett had believable chemistry. I didn’t like Christopher Briney’s wooden acting in The Summer I Turned Pretty, and unfortunately it’s not any better here.

Too Soft to Be Offensive, Too Dull to Be Funny

I’ve already gone into way too much detail about why I don’t like this movie, but the TLDR is that it’s basically the 2004 movie without any edge. Tina Fey was not taking any risks of getting canceled; I promise you can say “that’s social suicide” because no teenager has ever said “that’s social ruination.” There’s no bite and even iconic lines from the original movie aren’t delivered with the same vitriol. I don’t believe that Regina ruined Janis’s life to the same extent or that Cady’s revenge was justified. I miss the seeing the editing of the original movie that showed us the trio’s plan in action. In this movie, we get a song full of confetti and pastel colors called Revenge Party.

The cast doesn’t have the same chemistry, the director didn’t fully commit to making this an over-the-top musical, and ultimately the mean girls weren’t even mean enough. If you haven’t seen it in theaters already, I recommend waiting until it’s released on streaming in a few weeks, probably on Paramount Plus. Or perhaps just skipping it altogether and rewatching the 2004 movie instead.

And as always, some Letterboxd highlights

I’ve added in ones from the original movie, sadly the reviews for the new one aren’t as entertaining