This was a mixed bag for me.
The best thing about this movie is that we get Reneé Rapp’s Regina immortalized. She’s fabulous and her voice is just incredible. No one can come near Rachel McAdams in the role, but I thought Reneé’s take was unique and iconic in its own right.
I thought some of the modernization updates were smart, such as how they treated Regina’s distribution of the Burn Book and how Karen’s “Sexy” number plays out through the phones.
Similar to ColorTheHours048, I am a massive fan of the original movie and could recite it from memory beat by beat. Though I thought the stage adaptation was largely an abomination, it’s still Mean Girls and is just a fun, silly, dumb time. It filled a few nights for me back in 2018/2019 when I wanted to go to the theatre and turn my brain off completely for two and a half hours.
What the movie does well as an adaptation of the musical is cut so many of its songs. The score for Mean Girls is pretty terrible, but at least the movie streamlined it. This allows the film to move along at a brisk, breezy pace similar to the original film and not the pace of the Broadway musical, which sometimes stopped dead in its tracks for an overlong, gratuitous Casey Nicholaw production number.
However, I found the treatment of some of these songs to be sooo bizarre, largely in the orchestrations department. They clearly wanted to pop-ify the score, but I felt that doing so took away from their impact and the few moments when the score is actually good from a musical theatre perspective. “Someone Gets Hurt” turns into a sultry R&B song, which sounds delicious with Reneé singing it, but it completely takes away from the point of the song, which is about emotional manipulation and letting the audience into Regina’s mental calculations. "Apex Predator" doesn't land as hard with Janis and Damian narrating it and Cady just standing by watching it play out. “What Ifs” was a bafflingly dull replacement for “It Roars.” “Stupid With Love” turns into a monotone bore.
That leads me to the biggest flaw in the movie for me: Angourie Rice was soooo boring as Cady. Her vocal register has the span of three, maybe four notes. If some people thought Erika Henningsen was too bright and Disney Princess-y in the role, well, you have the complete opposite performance happening in this film. Lindsay Lohan's Cady was so good because she convincingly brought you along for the ride of her slow burn from transplant from Africa into true Plastic. Angourie kind of just gave deer-in-headlights for the whole thing.
All this said, though… I didn't actively dislike this movie. While the songs sounded off, I thought they were mostly filmed pretty creatively and inventively. I also ADORED
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I’ll probably watch it a few times when it comes out on streaming, but within a year or two, it’ll just be the 2004 original for me in perpetuity.
Updated On: 1/12/24 at 10:45 AM
