Mean Girls (Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr, 2024) is an adaptation of a Broadway musical that was itself an adaptation of the iconic 2004 film Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2004), and it’s exactly what it looks like.

North Shore High School in Evanston, Illinois, apparently pre-pandemic, probably in 2017 when the play premiered, who cares- high school junior Cady Heron (Angourie Rice), after 12 years of homeschooling with her zoologist parents in Kenya, is thrust into a different kind of wilderness when – I may as well summarize “Hamlet.” You know how the story goes.

The remakes simply have to stop. There’s no right answer. When Mean Girls (Jayne and Perez, 2024) calls back to Mean Girls (Waters, 2004) in an exaggerated way, or even in a direct quote, it’s wrong. When it branches off and tries to do its own thing, it’s also wrong. Nothing’s right, nothing is capable of being right, it’s all wrong.

In Mean Girls’ case, there aren’t even interesting decisions to make regarding what to call back to because it’s such specific moments that are iconic. Just re-release the movie, and people will come – and they are re-releasing it. This is possibly the best-remembered movie of 2004, plans for 20th anniversary re-releases are already in place for April and October.

Mean Girls (Jayne and Perez, 2024) is a low-quality, not very thoughtful, not particularly well-executed money collection job. The zingers from Tina Fey, original writer and still-credited writer for the musical and now this adaptation who also reprises her role as calculus teacher Ms. Norbury, have lost most of their pop over the course of these translations, and the higher concepts are phoned in as well. Heron’s explicit thought processes of applying the laws of the jungle to her new environment are compacted into “Apex Predator,” which shows the entire cast dancing and performing as beasts – the main cast is still mostly white, but there’s broad diversity in background extras, including most of the people performing as animals in this scene, so this number is brushing against some extremely dicey history by showing them pantomiming as wild animals. This is the level of thoughtfulness you can expect from this new adaptation.

Jayne and Perez, a married couple making their feature debut, and cinematographer Daryn Okada put in a ton of work on surreal fantasy sequences, shifting to heavy expressionistic lighting and tightening the aspect ratio for every musical sequence – imagine the gorgeous lighting shifts from La La Land, but they’re across a cut instead of happening in a single shot so it doesn’t have the emotional impact, and the film outside of the fantasy sequences is pointedly drab and less fun to look at instead of remaining colorful and interesting under normal circumstances. La La Land, which was clearly an inspiration for this adaptation, and Barbie are great examples films with a distinct fantasy setting that doesn’t make the “real world” boring, it makes the “real world” equally interesting in a contrasting way. This is a major error for Mean Girls (Jayne and Perez, 2024).  

Neither the fantasy nor “real world” side get enough play as the film is crushed and choked from a 150-minute Broadway performance into a 112 minute runtime, cutting 14 songs losing its soul. Mean Girls (Waters, 2004) clocked in at a tight 97 minutes, so there was certainly a mandate to not add a full hour to that from movie to movie, but Mean Girls (Jayne and Perez, 2024) is brutalized by this edit. Characters feel passed over, and I get multiple cases of severe whiplash as the film skips so quickly between the songs that remain, always with that dramatic aspect ratio and lighting shift that should be a great thing, but instead contributes more to the jarring effect of the edit. I know how the story goes, but I still feel lost at several points watching this movie. 

The songs, with music by Jeff Richmond and lyrics by Nell Benjamin, all suck. They’re really bad. They’re all very short by Broadway standards, though some of that comes from the overall truncating of the film, and they all default to repeated lyrics and radio-friendly pop stings. I have several teams’ worth of guys in my phonebook working at bars or banks who could do a better job with this. It’s absolutely unacceptable work, and it betrays the truth – the Broadway show is also a not-thoughtful, not well-executed money collection job.

Mean Girls’ (Jayne and Perez, 2024) layers of systemic shortcomings and apathy toward its own material, but also the cultural pressures it lives under, coalesce best around Karen Shetty (Avantika), a fan-favorite character due to Amanda Seyfried’s gut-busting, scene-stealing performance in the 2004 film. The role is noticeably expanded to give fans more of what they want. “More” here means poorly written songs and decently written new jokes that Avantika does a fine job with, though certainly not up to the standard set by the original performance – and because Mean Girls did not originate on the stage, the original performance was meant to be the only performance. No one remembers the first Ophelia from the early 1600s at The Globe, but Seyfried’s Karen Shetty will always remain an accessible reference point.

Because of the haphazard edit, Shetty doesn’t get her weather-woman moment, when she begins to transition from the dumb slut character, whose warmth, friendliness and eagerness to engage in sex has been harnessed and abused by Regina George (Reneé Rapp) to increase her clique’s power, to a more self-possessed character who gets to enjoy her own sluttyness. It’s maybe the only standout moment from Mean Girls (Waters, 2004) that isn’t directly repeated, but the slut-shaming to set this absent moment up remains in place. It’s a thoughtless, painful, disgusting way to treat a character, especially one who got into this position because of her popularity.

Through two layers of adaptation, it’s no surprise that Mean Girls (Jayne and Perez, 2024) is bad, though the depth and quantity of its failures is certainly disappointing. All I was looking forward to is tracking the way it would handle 20 years of social changes, but this may be the film’s biggest failure.

Smartphones pop up, but only in certain shots and only on cue, no one has them out casually wasting time in the background. The scene where George traps Heron by talking about the other Plastics behind their back in what Heron thinks is a private conversation, which would be one of the most interesting scenes to update for 2024, is instead cut. TikTok montages are used to bring the ripples the Plastics send through the school into the social media era, but no one uses the proverbial “calculator in your pocket” which teachers told us we wouldn’t have in 2004 to solve math problems, so the crucial way technology would change this story is ignored. The Mathlete State Championship scene plays out exactly the same. Technology is only used to facilitate the social dynamics that already existed.

The main change is to reflect evolving beauty standards that now include bigger women, but the breast-centric standard reflected in Mean Girls (Jayne and Perez, 2024) is, if anything, even more restrictive. In her introductory number “Meet the Plastics,” Regina George unzips her aviator jacket to expose the full top half of her breasts, which remain in the center frame as Heron stares in equal parts lust and horror – when the film transitions out from the musical sequence, George’s jacket is zipped back up, so we can see explicitly that this is Heron’s fantasy.

Heron’s newly explicit bisexuality does not alter the film, even though one of the films’ central conflicts is George’s discomfort with lesbian classmate Janis Ian (Auli’i Cravalho).

The Plastics, of course, don’t just have beauty standards, they have a written-down dress code separate from the rest of the school strictly enforced by their queen bee, and costuming is their primary expression of power in both films. Shetty’s tiny skirts, George’s exposed bra straps, every outfit they are seen in would result in months-long battles in any school district in America, and the Plastics are the Plastics because they have already won those fights. The way they display their adolescent female bodies is a plain and constant expression of not only their sexuality, but their freedom, power and the second set of rules they get to live by.

All of this, of course, is incompatible with the main plot of Mean Girls, in which Heron tricks George into eating high-calorie nutrition bars and uses her weight gain to usurp her social position. I’m trying so hard to see something modern in this modernization, but there’s just nothing there.

In 20 years, Mean Girls has gone from one of the most subtly provocative, enduring and iconic films of the century to a multimedia brand including said film, an OK musical and a bad movie adaptation of that musical, and that’s fine. That’s a consequence of success in a risk-abhorrent, capitalist media industry, but seeing such a prominent pillar of culture pulled from so thoughtlessly, seeing that the people put in charge of doing this have put so much less thought into it, feels like a psychic attack. It’s the kind of slop that can easily result from this machine, but it’s still painful to see.

Leopold Knopp is a UNT graduate. If you liked this post, you can donate to Reel Entropy here. Like Reel Entropy on Facebook and reach out to me at reelentropy@gmail.com.