Mean Girls is not fetch

Mean Girls (2024)

Mean Girls in 2004 was a formative movie for me.  I was young and naïve and raised in a patriarchal society, so I was unfamiliar with the concept of a female led comedy.  Mean Girls opened the doors to me for classics like Thelma and Louise, A League of Their Own, and Clueless.  Mean Girls also had a focus on math, which tickled my geeky heart.  Then, in 2018, Tina Fey recreated her masterpiece as a Broadway musical.  As a patron of the arts, I had to see it and saw it in New York and in Providence, being delighted both times.  Suffice it to say, that when I learned that the new Mean Girls movie was musical, I was happy as a clam.  How could I not be excited to have one of my favorite musicals to belt in the car be brought to a more accessible medium?  I was wrong, and my heart now hurts.  I am baffled at how someone could draw from two excellent versions of the same story and combine it to produce something so underwhelming.  It felt empty as I watched, lacking the heart and character of either of its predecessors.  It has all of the story beats and major jokes from the movie, but the characters just seemed off.  You barely got to know them because expositional scenes were replaced with expositional musical numbers, but those expositional musical numbers were bastardized versions of the songs from Broadway.  In fact, the first expositional number was replaced with a completely new song, so themes and characterizations later in the show appear to come out of nowhere.  I don’t know why that song was replaced, but that song brings me to a major problem I have with modern movie musicals: they don’t cast performers who are excellent singers.  Angourie Rice is a good actress and she can carry a tune, but she can’t carry a tune and show at the same time.  She lacks the pure vocal power necessary to portray a character that will usurp Renee Rapp’s Regina as queen of the school.  I will say, that Rice didn’t need to be autotuned like Emma Watson in Beauty and the Beast, but her breathy, quiet singing was constantly overshadowed when sandwiched between Rapp’s sultry siren songs and Auli’i Cravalho’s monster belts.  Rapp and Cravalho carry the movie with their performances, even though some of their songs were neutered or cut.  And with all of that, I can’t even say that it is bad.  It is just worse.  If neither of the original versions existed, it would qualify as “fine”.  It is like how the Madden franchise releases essentially the same game every year and adds a few components to make it prettier and more “real”, but it’s somehow less fun.  Because of that, I give Mean Girls a Madden NFL 2004 (the one with Mike Vick on the cover) out of Madden NFL 24.