Reduced, Reused, But Well Recycled

Photo: Jojo Whilden/Paramount Pictures

In the universe of Tina Fey, life in high school is nasty, brutish, and endlessly cyclical. Cliques may rise and fall, but there’s always someone on the upswing and someone else pushed in front of a bus — okay, allegedly pushed in front of a bus. Mean Girls, way back in 2004, ended with the implication that, even after relative peace was achieved in North Shore High between Cady, Regina, and Janis, another, younger group of pink-clad Plastics lurked just around the corner. As if to prove that hypothesis, the movie spawned a cheap 2011 sequel, a 2018 musical adaptation, and innumerable imitations and references in other millennial pop culture, among them a 2019 Ariana Grande music video. So either it’s a sign of the dwindling creativity of Hollywood or the staying power of Mean Girls as a collective fable that the story is back again, in turducken form as a movie version of its own stage-musical adaptation, gobbling up its own tail of cultural relevance — yes, they do make a “Thank U, Next” joke.

It turns out that Mean Girls: The Musical: The Movie is pretty good, and likely to succeed at its primary purpose, which is to remind you that the original Mean Girls is fun. The movie gets by via a relentlessly self-deprecating awareness of the absurdity of its own existence. Directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr., making their feature-length debut, kick things off with Janis (Moana’s Auli’i Cravalho) and Damian (Jaquel Spivey, recent Broadway breakout via A Strange Loop, killing every joke he gets here) sing-monologuing to the camera as if narrating an Instagram Story. Their song, “A Cautionary Tale,” is from the stage musical, but Jayne and Perez amp up the visual inventiveness (“It’s not easy making a movie!” Janis and Damian mutter to each other as they futz with the camera). A later number, “Revenge Party,” turns the hallways of the school into a pastel dream space, while the plastic’s resident dunce, Karen (played by Avantika, who somehow finds a lane of “stupid” both hilarious and distinct from Amanda Seyfried’s), sings an ode to sexy Halloween costumes via what’s essentially a “get ready with me” video. To update all this for the present, there are some contrived explanations — the girls made the burn book during a period in middle school where their teachers banned phone use — as well as a heavy ladling of references to the internet. Regina’s downfall plays out like a public cancellation, with a chorus of “Social Media Friends” posting their own reaction videos and memes, and even a brief cameo from Megan Thee Stallion wondering how she can get all this off her For You Page.

The updates work because of the fleetness of jokes like that last one, which wink at how the film might be overstaying its welcome, and yet find ways to zag in unexpected directions. Fey’s written the script for the original film, the book for the musical, and now this second film, returning to the same concept over and over like a scribe in some medieval monastery consecrated to our lady of perpetual bitchiness. She’s admirably ruthless in her punch-up work, delivering old concepts in new vehicles: Gretchen, for instance, now says that fetch is slang from “an old movie … Juno, I think?” Still, Fey is beholden to the hallowed beats of the original material. The most overused Mean Girls jokes now feel like Easter eggs from an installment of a Marvel Universe movie; even if a choir breaks into song when Aaron Samuels tells Cady it’s October 3, there’s nothing funny about the exchange anymore. The movie itself acknowledges this, moving as quickly as possible past the jokes that have been treaded into pulp toward fresher offerings. By the time Mrs. Norbury (Fey again) gathers everyone together for the requisite all-girls assembly teaching moment, the character herself rolls her eyes and sighs before launching into a familiar speech about bullying. A nifty bit of comedic repurposing from that assembly involves the girl who “doesn’t even go here!” (another homework line) reappearing during the finale to belt a few verses during a group number. You, like Mrs. Norbury, might be exhausted by the repetition, but you tend to be won over when it’s served with a twist.

The difficulty with a script so taut, however, is that, like a waterproof coating, it doesn’t let the songs in very well. The stage version had the same issue: Fey excels at boiling an interaction down to a pithy exchange or two, leaving precious little emotional territory for the music to cover. For the thing to function better as a musical, I think you’d need a worse book, or at least one willing to cede some of the story’s weight for the songs to lift on their own. Instead, with music by Fey’s husband, Jeff Richmond, and lyrics by Nell Benjamin, the songs restate what we already know, usually in mealy-mouthed terms — Cady, falling for Aaron Samuels sings, “I’m astounded and non-plussed / I am filled with calculust,” and that’s some of the better wordplay. The movie has, thankfully, edited down the song list from the original show. The various pastiche songs that remain, like “Stupid With Love,” will get stuck in your head despite themselves or are wisely buried under Jayne and Perez’s twirling camera movements and Kyle Hanagami’s relentless choreography (there are a lot of impressive tracking shots down chaotic hallways).

The other way to make these songs work is to sing them with such commitment that they acquire a force of their own, which is the approach that works for Reneé Rapp’s Regina George. Rapp, having recently left Sex Lives of College Girls, appears to be all-in on committing to a career as a pop star, to the extent that her Mean Girls solos, like the ferocious “World Burn,” sound re-orchestrated from the stage version to resemble whispery, synth-y B-sides from her album Snow Angel. Some have known since the 2018 Jimmy Awards that Rapp can belt, option up, and then option up again like no other, but I do think she shouldn’t abandon acting along the way. She’s got a leonine take on Regina that works for Fey’s safari-flavored vision of high-school politics; you feel as if the character is always back on her haunches, conserving energy, but ready to maul anyone who crosses her. Rapp spikes the menace of classic lines like “get in, bitch” with sensuality, which guides her away from Rachel McAdams’s iconically brittle performance toward a version of the story that’s really a love triangle between Regina, Janis, and Cady. (Though Regina, tragically, is still nominally straight in this telling, Cravahlo’s Janis is openly gay, thank God.) It helps that Rapp also has a ringer, visually and comedically, to work with in Busy Phillips, going for broke as Regina’s attention-starved mother, who now runs a “cool mom” Instagram account.

Between the fun newcomers and the Fey repertory players dropping in for cameos — Jon Hamm in short-shorts teaches sex-ed, and Emily in Paris’s Ashley Park teaches, what else, French — the story’s nominal main character does get totally drowned out. Angourie Rice is sweet and approachable as Cady, but her voice is less refined than her co-stars’ and she can’t pull off the magic trick of transforming into a queen bee when the story demands it. That’s probably an impossible ask for anyone who isn’t Lindsay Lohan, to be fair, and when the movie makes Lohan’s mark most memorable (I won’t spoil the surprises), you feel for Rice by comparison. She’s giving a gentler performance than anything you saw in that original film, helped along by Jenna Fischer’s warmth as her mother, but as the moral of Mean Girls might go: Nice gets blown out of the water when snark is on the table.

Such is also the cautionary message of Mean Girls itself. Every iteration of the story wraps up with a message about breaking the social structure, embracing kindness, and respecting others’ faults, but it never resists the allure of reaching the top of the hierarchy first. This version tames some of the brutality of the original, in line with a slightly more progressive sensibility: Regina’s self-inflicted burn book insult is now “fugly cow” rather than “slut” and Fey’s eyebrow-raising jokes about Coach Carr having sex with his Asian female students have been cut. (The obsession with Regina’s weight, crucial to the plot as it’s told, remains.) But the fundamental belief underlying any version of Mean Girls might be that everyone has a little venom inside them that, if given the opportunity, they would love to unleash on their classmates. Wouldn’t it feel good to inflict random dress codes on your best friends? Wouldn’t you want to steal an ex back just because? Late in this movie, there’s a little gag where one of Kevin G.’s associate nerds is trying to get his own version of fetch off the ground and is immediately shut down by his own social superior. It’s a grim Hobbesian universe, which is probably what makes it so very funny, and so sticky in our cultural consciousness. Mean girls are everywhere, even among the mathletes. And so long as they flourish, we’ll keep returning to Mean Girls.