Was the world calling out for an all-singing, all-dancing Mean Girls remake? Perhaps not. But this movie adaptation of writer Tina Fey's 2018 Broadway musical, itself based on her stone-cold classic 2004 high school comedy, brings more than enough freshness to the table to make it a diverting and energizing watch.
Highlighting just how relevant the two-decade old original still is, the plot cleaves closely to what has come before. Sweetly naive sixteen-year-old Cady Heron (Angourie Rice) moves back to the United States from Africa, where she had been homeschooled by her mother (Jenn Fischer).
She may as well have been transplanted from another planet, as the newcoming high-schooler tries to get to grips with the pecking order of her hostile new environment. Cady is mercifully taken under the wing of kindly outsiders Janis (Auli’i Cravalho) and Damian (Jaquel Spivey), who give her the lay of the land.
When Cady is invited to join the ultra-popular clique the "Plastics", headed up by Queen Bee Regina George (Reneé Rapp) with the insecure Gretchen Wieners (Bebe Wood) and vacuous Karen Shetty (Avantika Vandanapu) in tow, Janis uses it as an opportunity to enact revenge on her morally bankrupt former bestie Regina.
However, Cady, fluidly infiltrating the ranks of the popular set, unwittingly invokes Regina’s full wrath when she falls for her calculus classmate Aaron (Christopher Briney), Regina’s floppy-haired ex-boyfriend.
While the premise will be familiar to most, the musical leanings of this remake translate surprisingly well to the screen and the script contains enough laugh-out-loud moments to keep interest levels piqued.
In a film jam-packed with larger-than-life performances, Auli'i Cravalho and Jaquel Spivey manage to well and truly steal the show as Janis and Damian, crucially giving the proceedings the necessary emotional backbone.
Popstar Reneé Rapp is gloriously ruthless as Regina, while Tina Fey and Tim Meadows effortlessly step back into their roles as Ms. Norbury and Principal Duvall. Jon Hamm is underused as the school's P.E. teacher Coach Carr, but Busy Phillips is better deployed as Regina's overly familiar mother who just wants to be part of the girl gang.
Mean Girls contains some star-making turns, polished, if somewhat forgettable, musical numbers, and retains a decent slice of the magic of the original.
