Can a movie musical based on a Broadway musical based on a film comedy that in turn was based on a parenting book be any good? Sure — if only because the writer-producer Tina Fey and the producer Lorne Michaels have made sure that little has changed in their money-printing property since the first movie hit theaters in 2004. Few stories, it turns out, are as comically and horrifyingly reliable as those set in high school; few villains are as dependably hissable as a desirable young woman with an ostensibly cold heart.
In keeping with this material’s cheerfully derivative history it seems right to start with the New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell, who called the original film — directed by Mark Waters and starring a preternaturally self-assured Lindsay Lohan — “tart and often charming.” Fast forward to 2018 when the paper’s former theater critic 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.
Once again, the story — by Fey, who also wrote the first movie and the Broadway show — drops Cady (a sweet Angourie Rice), a bright home-schooled teen fresh from Kenya, into a high-school hellscape. There, she meets nerds and jocks, alphas and betas, and attracts the notice of the queen bee, the aptly named Regina (Reneé Rapp, who played the role on Broadway). Flanked by her vassals, Karen (Avantika) and Gretchen (Bebe Wood), Regina reigns supreme at school where, as the student body’s most attentively studied subject, she is feared, desired and loathed, at times simultaneously.
As in the original film, the latest Cady is a quick study and soon learns her new habitat’s rules on her way to self-actualization and group acceptance. She befriends a pair of too-cool-for-school art kids, Janis and Damian — the tag-teaming scene-stealers Auli’i Cravalho and Jaquel Spivey — who encourage her to insinuate herself into Regina’s clique, a.k.a. the Plastics, to learn its secrets. Cady does and the usual complications ensue, including a chaste romance with Regina’s ex, Aaron (Christopher Briney), a heartthrob with floppy hair. Betrayal, comeuppance, repentance and triumph follow.
In making the transition from stage to screen, the filmmakers have cut many of the show’s songs by Jeff Richmond (music) and Nell Benjamin (lyrics). The remaining tunes blur together with the exception of “Meet the Plastics” and “World Burn,” Regina’s character-defining lung-busters. Nothing if not a show-boater, she enters in black fetish-wear for “Plastics,” belting it out with such old-school diva command that she smacks the movie awake. She doesn’t have the nuance of Rachel McAdams, who played the role in the 2004 film. But Rapp gives the character oomph and swagger (the dominatrix-lite get-up helps), and when Regina howls “I don’t care who you are,” you readily believe her.
The directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr., making their feature debut, keep things moving if rarely popping. They splash on bright colors and break the fourth wall, filling the frame with smartphone images in which characters look directly at the camera. These screens-within-screens fragment the visual plane and underscore the ubiquity of social media. Yet, as with 1980s films like the original “War Games” that filled the frame with PC monitors when home computers were still novel, the results are largely flat and ornamental. What’s missing is the immersive, near-out-of-body experience that staring at smartphones can effect, an immersion that good movies create as a matter of course.
Despite an occasional visual flourish — notably the energetic opener, which briskly takes you from a duet inside a garage to a plaintive solo on the plains of Kenya — Jayne and Perez generally stick to the template set by the first film. (The similarities between the movies, especially in some of the nonmusical scenes, can be startling, though the cast here largely looks college age.) Although Fey has tweaked the material, adding jokes here and there (including a groaner about a “toilet baby,” ew), much remains the same, even with additions like Jenna Fischer, Jon Hamm and Busy Philipps. Fey again plays a wisecracking teacher while Tim Meadows is back as the alarmed principal.
What also remains unchanged is the fundamental truth that gave the first “Mean Girls” its animating tension: That for all the speeches, jokey (and sincere) finger-wagging and now songs, it really, really loves its title characters. That’s especially clear here. Rice is a pleasant-enough presence, yet unlike Lohan she never manages to elbow the mean girls aside, and Rapp’s powerhouse singing only makes Regina more dominant. There is, after all, a reason that mean girls are invariably more fun than the nice ones. Though, as the 20 years between the first movie and this one have reminded us — and as legions of nice and putatively nasty women have proven time and again — the world loves mean girls and women until it doesn’t, and then it hates them with a vengeance.
Mean Girls
PG-13. For language and the usual teen stuff. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters.
