★★
By Vanessa Huang
“This isn’t your mother’s Mean Girls,” declares this film, adapted from a stage musical which was in turn adapted from Tina Fey’s original film in 2004. And it’s true: despite its beat-for-beat recreation, a lot has been updated in the 20 years since its emergence, enough to bring something that feels entirely different this time – something much worse.
There’s the matter of the original’s timeless cardigans and miniskirts, supplanted in this musical version by boxy Shein microtrends: ultra-fast fashion leaving already cheap-looking fits feeling woefully dated. The same goes for its TikTok-ification of high school social dynamics, doing little beyond soullessly pandering to Gen Z’s fickle sensibilities.
Then comes the sanding down of the comedic bite, making tepid what was once searing. We are to make do with “fugly cow” (let a girl be a slut!) and heavy-handed faux feminism – as if to forget that the girls are supposed to be mean in this story.
But sounding the death knell for this hapless adaptation is its entire raison d’être: the music that was so clearly meant to set it on the successful pipeline of film to stage musical to musical film, – among the likes of Hairspray and Little Shop of Horrors, for example. How disappointing that the songs are middling at best, feeling like hasty appendages tacked on to justify continued iterations of a cultural phenomenon.
The film’s one saving grace? Reneé Rapp, whose vicious Regina George feels utterly captivating in this charisma drought. Grool indeed.
Illustration by Francesca Corno
