“Mean Girls” was Tina Fey’s smart, funny 2004 movie that she turned with her husband into an overlong, ill-timed Broadway musical (as I wrote in my review) in 2018, which has now been adapted into a movie musical. So what do the film critics think twenty years after they first weighed in on this story? Read on. Excerpted and linked from meanest to nicest. (Below the reviews, the Broadway connections and the cast)
there’s a hollow emptiness to this rendition that’s thoroughly soul-sucking. It’s as if by adapting the film, which was adapted from a book, into a musical and back into a movie, Fey was left utterly clueless as to why the movie she wrote two decades ago worked so well in the first place.- Jenny Nulf, Austin Chronicle
“Mean Girls” doesn’t feel so much like a fresh take on a beloved film as it does a take on its own opening number, “A Cautionary Tale”: This is how not to adapt a Broadway musical to the big screen. Dan Bayer, NBP.
The movie musical version of Mean Girls—written, like the 2004 movie that spawned it, by Tina Fey, and directed by Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr.—is so overworked and garish that it exists on a plane of its own. Everything that made the original picture so sly, funny, and affecting is gone. Musical numbers spell out the obvious, and loudly. Characters behave reprehensibly and then use faux feminism as a shield—a strange flip from the original story, which made the case that bitchiness and honest self-expression aren’t the same thing. Even lines drawn straight from the original feel more cumbersome than breezy. Musicals—certainly this type of musical—are supposed to be pure pleasure, but Mean Girls comes off as enforced fun, a kind of bullying disguised as entertainment. Stephanie Zacharek, Time Magazine.
…all the effervescence and fun have been drained out of the material in this labored reincarnation, a movie musical made by people who appear to have zero understanding of movie-musical vernacular. Debuting co-directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. are best known as collaborators on the FX shortform series Quarter Life Poetry, but their choppy work here seems firmly entrenched in Perez’s music-video background. The same goes for choreographer Kyle Hanagami.
The songs seldom spring organically from the story and more often feel so awkwardly shoehorned in that you come to dread them. What’s worse is that the music is so gratingly over-produced and studio-enhanced you miss the high of characters spontaneously singing. In terms of musical deficiencies, that’s a deal-breaker. The final nail in the coffin is the creative team’s decision wherever possible to frame the songs through social media. The device is used so unrelentingly you start to wonder why the entire movie wasn’t made on TikTok. Maybe it would be less of a garish eyesore on a smartphone - David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter
It’s a sanitized, Cliff’s Notes version of the original with a few songs thrown in. It’ll be great for audiences to see Renee Rapp, if they don’t know of her already, but she’s not in it enough to help save the rest of the film. This may not be your mother’s “Mean Girls” but it’s doubtful it’ll be anyone’s.-Kristen Lopez, The Wrap
[The songs] feel like filler on screen. A solid high-school comedy keeps stopping dead for a series of what amount to so-so MTV videos….Though the dialogue has been smartly updated by Ms. Fey, the story is virtually a beat-by-beat remake of the first movie. – Kyle Smith, The Wall Street Journal
it’s an enjoyable retread for anyone who doesn’t mind seeing this cattiest of films getting declawed…[As new girl Cody]Angourie Rice is Lindsay Lohan’s nerdier, sweeter and less compelling successor in the role, a socially awkward alien trying and failing to fit in….It’s almost like Mean Girls is embarassed of being a musical – Alice Saville, Time Out
Times film critic Elvis Mitchell…called the original film — directed by Mark Waters and starring a preternaturally self-assured Lindsay Lohan — “tart and often charming.”…Ben Brantley described the Broadway musical as “likable but seriously over-padded.” For its part, the new “Mean Girls” lands somewhere between these two takes. It’s not especially tart and is undeniably over-padded, but its charms and ingratiating likability remain intact.- Manohla Dargis, NY Times
you can rest assured that “Mean Girls,” the movie musical, sticks close to the spirit and to the letter of the movie that updated and mythologized the culture of gossip and backstabbing for a new generation. The new movie nudges the material into our own era…
…There’s a heightened-Disney-channel, made-for-streaming kinetic aesthetic to “Mean Girls.” The film, ironically, might have been more electric if it were willing to be a little more stationary. – Owen Gleiberman, Variety
As it did in 2004, Mean Girls is a playground for a melange of fresh, new talent for whom we hope the limit does not exist. Did we really need another film version? No. But it’s pretty grool that the one we got is such fun. Grade: B–Maureen Lee Lenker, Entertainment Weekly
The Broadway Connections
Renée Rapp was the replacement for Taylor Louderman on Broadway as queen bee Regina George, which she now portrays in the new movie. Ashley Park, who was one of the three performers in the Broadway musical nominated for a Tony (along with Louderman and Grey Henson) is Madame Park; Jaquel Spivey, nominated for a Tony for his lead role in A Strange Loop plays Damian (the character whom Grey Henson played on Broadway.)
Other cast members
Auli’i Cravalho (Moana, Little Mermaid Live) as Janis; Angourie Rice (Spider-Man: Homecoming) as Cady Heron; Avantika (Senior Year) as the ditzy Karen; Bebe Wood (Love, Victor) as toaster strudel heiress Gretchen; Christopher Briney (The Summer I Turned Pretty) as Regina’s boyfriend Aaron Samuels; Girls5Eva star Busy Phillips as Mrs. George; The Office‘s Jenna Fischer as Ms. Heron; Mean Girls stage and screen writer Tina Fey as Ms. Norbury; SNL alum Tim Meadows as Mr. Duvall; Mad Men star Jon Hamm as Coach Carr; Mahi Alam (American Born Chinese) as Kevin Ganatra; and Connor Ratliff (Search Party) as a new teacher character, Mr. Rapp.
