After Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump and the Chiefs returning to the Super Bowl to spar against the 49ers, Mean Girls is the third most insufferable reboot that nobody wanted or asked for. The new movie, based on a musical that, in turn, was based on the original 2004 movie, lacks the charm, vulnerability, cheek, and style of its source material, but its real original sin is its obvious disdain for the generation that made it famous.
Mean Girls remains the only film that comedienne Tina Fey has ever written, yet the original, a feat of both composition and casting, captured lightning in a bottle. On top of iconic one-liners that millennials still deadpan two decades later — “boo, you whore!” — Mean Girls depended on the raw charisma of Lindsay Lohan and the comedy chops of a largely unknown supporting cast. Perhaps Mean Girls shot Amanda Seyfried, Rachel McAdams, and Lizzy Caplan into superstardom, but more likely, the sleeper hit of a film was made into a masterpiece by a retinue of conventionally statuesque beauties who dared to embrace the story’s absurdities, physical comedy, and transformation with unhinged glee.
Mean Girls, the reboot, is twice as mean and half as vulnerable thanks to a cast that fails to embrace the nuance of the original and a script seemingly fearful of puritanical zoomers.
Crucially in the original, Fey’s Ms. Norbury, the math teacher trying to bring a classwide cat fight to heel, tells dozens of mean girls of all shapes, sizes, and social strata, “You can’t keep calling each other sluts and bitches. It just makes it OK for guys to call you that.”
It’s a crucial real-life lesson for real girls, but in the reboot, it’s removed because it’s irrelevant because this generation, we’re told, don’t call each other sluts, and calling oneself a bitch is a point of pride.
In a final scene, our doe-eyed protagonist Cady, played by the one-dimensional Angourie Rice, returns from the dark side to attempt to make amends with the dethroned and now rethroned queen bee, Regina George, played by Renee Rapp, who sucks all the air out of the room and not necessarily in a good way.
“I know I have to change, and it’s harsh when people say I’m a bitch, but you know what they’d call me if I was a boy?” Regina says.”Reginald. That’s what my mom was going to name me if I was a boy. Honestly, I’d rather be bitch.”
For all of Rapp’s singing chops — and there is no denying that the actress, who played Regina in the Broadway show, has pipes to make up for much of the rest of the cast — Rapp brings no sensitivity to the role. Her Regina never honestly pretends to befriend Cady, which removes any emotional weight from the betrayal that’s supposed to set the story in motion, when Regina kisses the boy Cady confesses she has a crush on. This Regina, inexplicably clad in cargo pants and Shein-style viscose and pleather, doesn’t flirt with, charm, or flatter her future victims at all, lending no credence to the notion that she would be worshipped and feared in equal measure as was the Regina so expertly played by McAdams 20 years ago.
Neither Rice nor Rapp have any chemistry with leading man Aaron Samuels, here played by Christopher Briney in a rendition that looks and acts more haunted than hunky as the original Aaron was. One bright spot of the reboot is actress Avantika Vandanapu, who actually dares to lean into the camp, sex appeal, and unapologetic stupidity of Karen, the bimbo immortalized by Seyfried. More than once, I couldn’t help but wonder why Vandanapu wasn’t cast as Regina, who, beyond her lack of magnetism in this rendition, also looks like she’s 30 years old.
Ironically enough, the 24-year-old Rapp has outright embraced her loathing of millennials, calling herself ageist toward the OG MG generation.
“I just feel like, I don’t know, I just was always the young one in situations,” Rapp eloquently articulated in an interview with Bravo’s Andy Cohen. “Like, millennial women were always coming for me, and I was like: ‘Shut up.’”
Fey similarly dismissed the backlash from millennials against the reboot.
“Millennials especially, like, they feel real ownership of the movie,” Fey said. “And they were sort of like, ‘You can’t! We own this!’ And I was sort of like, ‘Well, no. It’s my thing!’”
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For all of my generation’s faults, I do believe that we understand how intellectual property ownership works, and yes, we will criticize even that which we didn’t create. We will criticize the reboot’s crappy TikTok choreography and the fact that this movie-musical didn’t even seem to embrace the fact that it was both a movie and a musical. We will criticize the fact that the reboot’s Cady is way too dumb and neither the story’s protagonist nor narrator anymore, and we will criticize the fact that the new protagonist, Regina, is now way too mean.
And we’ll be right — and whereas the old Mean Girls encouraged us not to be a bitch, under the reboot’s rules, we’re now allowed to embrace it.