It’s a question of behavior. Are we born decent and then choose to behave indecently? Or is it the other way around? What shapes a person: nature or nurture?

The 2004 teen-comedy Mean Girls—with a script by Tina Fey based on Rosalind Wiseman’s nonfiction parental guide, Queen Bees & Wannabes—is firmly in the nurture camp. The story plucks Cady (Lindsay Lohan), a girl raised and educated in Kenya, where her parents are conducting research, out of the savannah and drops her in an affluent suburban town and the supremely stratified society of high school.

A math whiz and a quick study, Cady identifies that the habits of the American teenager closely resemble those of animals on the African plains. So she embraces all the typical traits of manipulation—playing dumb to increase her attraction, putting others down to build herself up, etc.—in her swift and short climb to the role of alpha.

One of the charms of 2004’s Mean Girls was how effortlessly and completely Cady let the system corrupt her. The Cady (Angourie Rice) at the center of 2024’s Mean Girls is significantly less aware of her behavior and the cost of her choices. It’s more like she is being pulled toward her final form rather than walking the path purposefully. It is not an improvement on the character.

Nor is the 2024 Mean Girls musical remake an improvement on the ’04 film. Fey returns as screenwriter and math teacher Mrs. Norbury, but instead of Mark Waters in the director’s chair, we get Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr., two first-time feature filmmakers with a flair for musical numbers—lots of sweeping one-takes through crowded bodies—but crickets when it comes to comedy. The snappy edits and bon mots of the ’04 film, all laboriously recreated here, either linger ungainly or are dispatched so unceremoniously that it feels perfunctory to make Damian (Jaquel Spivey) say, “You go, Glen Coco.”

Like Cady, all the core characters return for another bite at the apple, though with tweaks that add little. Janice (Auli’i Cravalho) is now a full-fledged lesbian, Karen (Avantika) is rendered so dumb that she seems to spend most of the movie remembering to breathe, and Aaron (Christopher Briney) takes an already bland character and manages to pare even that modicum of personality down. Adding insult to injury is the addition of Jon Hamm as Coach Carr, an out-of-touch P.E. teacher in charge of teaching the sex-ed class. Hamm’s appearance is so brief that I bet a few executives at Paramount cut his part down to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo after they saw the rushes.

The rest of the teaching staff (Fey and Tim Meadows, particularly) put so little oomph behind their lines that they inadvertently give the feeling that these characters are trapped in a bizarre hellscape where they must play out this same scenario, semester after semester, year after year, for 20 years.

There are more than a few winks to the audience that none of this is new. As one character says with forced surprise—I won’t say whom, but you can probably guess—“This has only happened once before!” It’s all pretty disingenuous. Particularly in the third act, when Cady seems to feel neither shame nor guilt for her actions but must apologize to her friends, family, school, and Regina George for the sake of the narrative. Oh, did I forget to mention Regina George? Yeah, she’s here, played by Reneé Rapp, who starred in the show when it played on Broadway. She sings. It’s fine. Most of the cast sings, and their songs are fine, too. They just don’t add anything to the interiority of the characters that we don’t already know. It’s a poor facsimile of something that was once irreverent and insightful but now just feels like a soulless cash grab.

Mean Girls (2024)
Directed by Samantha Jayne, Arturo Perez Jr.
Screenplay by Tina Fey
Based on the stage musical Mean Girls, based on the movie Mean Girls, based on the book Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman
Produced by Erin David, Tina Fey, Micah Frank, Sonia Friedman, Eric Gurian, Lorne Michaels, Jeff Richmond, Christine Schwarzman, Marisa Sechrest
Starring: Angourie Rice, Reneé Rapp, Jon Hamm, Tina Fey, Avantika, Auli’i Cravalho, Christopher Briney, Bebe Wood, Jaquel Spivey, Tim Meadows, Busy Philipps, Jenna Fischer
Paramount Pictures, Rated PG-13, Running time 112 minutes, Opens Jan. 12, 2024

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