Mean Girls – Another Entry for the Burn Book (Early Review)

There are typically two varieties of the soulless Hollywood remake. The first is the remake that adds nothing of note to the existing source material, merely made to cash in on name recognition while copying every beat of the original (this brand is typically reserved for English-language remakes of foreign films). Then there’s the remake that does make changes to its source material, changes that serve as little more than insults to the legacy of what created it. There is, of course, a third option: the ever-rare good Hollywood remake, striking that perfect balance of reverence for the old and hunger for the new, blending a classic story into something entirely fresh and worthy of showcasing for a new generation. And this third category does not include Mean Girls.

On the off-chance that you were born anytime before 1985 or after 2010, Mean Girls follows the mishaps of Cady Heron (Rice), a new high school student transferring from Kenya to Evanston, Illinois. In making this difficult social adjustment, Cady befriends social outcasts Janis (Auli’i Cravalho) and Damian (Jaquel Spivey), all the while attracting the attention of the school’s popular crew, The Plastics, led by ice queen Regina George (Rapp). When Regina and the Plastics take a liking to Cady, she and her friends hatch a scheme for her to infiltrate this toxic clique, in the hopes of instigating, as one of the film’s many musical interludes calls it, a Revenge Party. From there, Cady’s commitment to the cause calls her true loyalties into question.

First-time directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. take over the mantle from Mark Waters, but just as it was in 2004, the real voice of Mean Girls is comedy legend Tina Fey, who wrote the screenplay and is featured in a supporting role as Cady’s homeroom/advanced calculus teacher. The fact that Fey stuck through this story’s journey from film, to Broadway play, to film adaptation of the play—as if this were a far less serious (or good) version of The Color Purple—is almost as commendable as the depths of laziness to which her newest contribution stoops. One almost has to admire Fey’s savviness in cashing a paycheck for basically copy-pasting her previous script—sometimes down to exact lines of dialogue—and somehow making the few changes ones that instantly make everything worse.

Most of this comes down to the film’s casting and how Jayne and Perez Jr. utilize these new players. Never mind the fact that returning comedians Fey and Tim Meadows are on autopilot, or that Jon Hamm appears to periodically make audiences wonder why he’s there; the stars of the show are supposed to be the teens, and the impression these youngsters make are done no favours by the hollowness of this adaptation. Rice is incredibly sweet and innocent, a perfect vessel for Cady’s transformation. But unlike Lindsay Lohan’s iconic turn, Rice is simply too perfect to make this character flow believable in any sense. Between its lethargic musical numbers, the film doesn’t give Rice the space to actually explore the cattiness of this character in a way that sells the fact that she grows to enjoy her venomous position in the academic food chain. Auli’i Cravahlo is at least perfectly calibrated as Janis, using her charisma and strong pipes to prove once more that we as a society have failed this promising actor post-Moana. Rapp, meanwhile, can claim the victory of looking like a spitting image of her predecessor Rachel McAdams, but just like Rice’s overshot perfection, Rapp’s lethal attitude is so ingrained in this performance that her own rushed development feels stifled and unbelievable.

Occasionally, a new flourish will serve the story well. The gang sings a ballad about the “Apex Predator,” so now Regina George drives a doorless jeep? Cute. Cady’s introductory musical number indicates her more active desire to venture into this new part of her life, rather than being forced into it by her parents? I’m with you so far. Social media being a driving force behind all the gossip and bullying? Poorly executed, but checks out. But once the film gets to the actual meat of the story—again, a story that was literally done almost exactly the same way 20 years ago—is where this remake completely flatlines. With miscalculated performances and hurried plot beats brushed to the side to make room for sleek music videos disguised as earnest musical numbers, Mean Girls lives up to its namesake only in baseline content, and not where it mattered most: in the spirit of a well-intentioned cautionary tale of the corruptibility of adolescence.

The film’s climactic song opens with five simple words: “Cheap, fake, easy to break.” That’s probably the most insightfully self-aware contribution Mean Girls has to offer.

still courtesy of Paramount Pictures

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Julian Malandruccolo

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