Mean Girls (2024) — Movie Review
Mean Girls - a musical. It was said there. The ads and trailers for the 2024 remake of Mean Girls should have been mentioned first, but this isn't a review of marketing decisions, so let's move on.
The 2017 musical adaptation of the same name, itself an adaptation of the classic 2004 film starring a 17-year-old Lindsay Lohan , was an adaptation of the 2002 book The Queen Bee and The Wishers by the author Rosalind Wiseman . Mean Girls is a story that has been told many times. This time the warning is told from the Gen Z perspective.
Angora Rice makes up for what she lacks in vocal power with choice and gravitas. In fact, Rice's portrayal of Cady Heron is as positive as Lohan's, which is a compliment anyway. Other standout performers building on the foundation laid by the original cast include Renee Rapp as the fearsome Regina George and Jakel Spivey as the explosive Damian Hubbard. Most of the other actors maintain the status quo but do nothing to add anything to the iconic characters we saw two decades ago.
Lovers of theatrical entertainment will find many familiar things here. However, the filmmakers approached the musical arrangement in an interesting way. The 2024 film musical Mean Girls lost more than half of its Broadway counterpart's songs, and those adapted from the stage show into the film were adapted into 2020s pop songs. Average Girls get mixed results with this technique. It seems like the makers of the film wanted every song to sound like a hit. Some like "Meet The Plastics", "A Cautionary Tale" and "Stupid With Love" work well in pop style, while others like "Apex Predator", "Revenge Party" and "IC Star" are mostly restrained and lose their energy or emotional impact.
The transition between the film's fictional "musical" world, which includes the choreography and singing of North Shore High School students, and the "real world" can be confusing as the film progresses. However, viewers probably won't care what's "real" and what's not, because what's on screen is interesting enough to keep audiences interested. It is not a musical instrument worthy of fanfare; If the audience is there from the beginning, it will probably stay that way.
Instead of relying primarily on its audience's nostalgia, Mean Girls managed to transition from a millennial icon to a Gen-Z offering. It remains to be seen whether younger generations will see themselves in this nearly quarter-century-old version of the tale, cementing it as a timeless story that needs to be told again and again (a la A Star Is Born). However, the filmmakers' efforts in the 2024 version of "Mean Girls" provided ample opportunity to do so.
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