The ‘Mean Girls’ Musical Remake Could Stand to Be Nastier
Remaking Mean Girls is basically like remaking Citizen Kane: The onshot you have of doing it successfully is if you make Charles Foster Kane a beautiful bisexual who sings a bunch of songs. And if it were judged by that metric alone, Mean Girls (in theaters Jan. 12), the musical revamp of the revolutionary teen flick—and adapted from Tina Fey’s successful Broadway version—would be a triumph.
But remaking a worldwide cultural phenomenon with an everlasting legacy should involve more than just the same, high-functioning parts, souped-up for a new generation. The Mean Girls movie-musical barely differentiates itself from its predecessor. Watching the remake is often akin to throwing on the original movie and turning your head to see your friends quote every line by heart. Most of it is a word-for-word duplicate, one that has had its sharp bite shaved down to avoid the kind of thorny provocation that made the first film an instant classic.
A sanitized version of one of the 21st century’s greatest movies should be insufferable. But some respectably catchy music and a couple of breakout stars do wonders for lifting the 2024 Mean Girls onto its own two feet, just tall enough to stand confidently next to its progenitor. While it still has no decent reason to exist other than to make a few bucks off of nostalgic millennials and curious newcomers, Mean Girls prevails by leaning hard into its own pointlessness and letting its stars live out their catty dreams—even if their claws don’t scratch hard enough.