Right up there with “The Devil Wears Prada,” Tina Fey’s 2004 cult classic “Mean Girls” has held a special place in the hearts of many Evanston and Northwestern community members. Evanstonians can now catch a new take on the original film — adapted from the flashy 2018 Broadway musical adaptation of the same name — playing at the AMC Evanston.
The only moment that sparked applause at a pink-themed early access screening on Jan. 10, though, was a brief reference to new girl Cady Heron (Angourie Rice) moving to Evanston from Africa because her mother landed a job at NU.
The new film, with a screenplay by Fey and starring Reneé Rapp as “Queen Bee” Regina George, misses the mark on what made the stage adaptation work. Despite strong performances from much of the cast and a fresh supply of comedic material, the movie musical tries to have it both ways to its detriment. The adaptation manages to lose both the incisiveness of the original film and the flashy appeal of the Broadway musical.
While the team behind “Mean Girls” has said it hoped to avoid scaring away fans by going full Broadway, the new music only makes the musical theatre schtick stick out like a sore thumb. The score — stripped of some of the Broadway production’s strongest numbers — gets a new and unwelcome pop-rock makeover, putting a glaring juxtaposition between Nell Benjamin’s witty, theater-esque lyrics, and the movie’s synthesized, over-produced mixing.
Songs like “A Cautionary Tale” work with a bit more electric guitar and a bit less belting, but others are simply painful.
The songs that remain in the scaled-back tracklist often feel awkwardly shoved into the script (as if the directors, Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr., lack the understanding of what makes musical theater work as a genre). At other points, lines from missing songs are timidly spoken as dialogue, and the storyline aches for music to push it along, such as with the regrettably absent “Where Do You Belong?”
The cast is certainly not short of vocal talent, but Rice (who never quite reaches Lindsay Lohan’s level of nuance in the role) strains her way through her character’s few remaining musical numbers. It becomes clear less than five minutes into the film why “It Roars,” Cady’s upbeat “I Want” song from the original musical, was left out to the chagrin of fans and replaced with a weak original number: Rice simply can’t hit the notes.
Auli’i Cravalho and Jaquel Spivey, having each already proven their chops in “Moana” and “A Strange Loop,” steal the screen as Janis and Damian, the story’s two-man Greek Chorus who take Cady under their wing and help orchestrate Regina’s downfall. Both embezzle the score with clever choral commentary and consistent comedic cracks. They’re particularly effervescent in the well-staged “Revenge Party,” which benefits from strong production design and Kyle Hanagami’s contemporary choreography.
The film leans into Rapp’s singular cool-girl charisma, but in doing so, it sacrifices the very callous quality that made Regina George such an appealing character in the first place. While Rachel McAdams’ Regina was “shiny, fake and hard,” as Damian and Janis describe her, Rapp’s is transparently cruel and one-dimensional.
While Rapp’s vocal prowess is certainly one of the film’s highlights, the low lighting, foreboding framing and moody mise en scène contribute to a bone-chilling version of Regina that feels more “Heathers” than “Mean Girls” or “Legally Blonde.” The problem here is that Rapp’s portrayal of Regina shatters the allure of the Queen Bee: her ability to inspire both fear and admiration from her peers.
It doesn’t help that Rapp is dressed in cheap and garish costumes, which swing from dark leather sets to gaudy sheer tops that look like they were snagged off the sale section of SHEIN.
While Rapp receives some nice fodder from her plastic peers, Paramount’s mission to sell Reneé Rapp by pushing her front and center leaves an unsatiated desire for more character development from Bebe Wood’s Gretchen, who soars in a mellow rendition of “What’s Wrong With Me?” but never progresses beyond surface-level insecurity and subservience. Avantika, fortunately, embodies the airhead demeanor of Karen, confidently swerving through a performance of “Sexy” that doesn’t stray too far from the original song.
The film also misses an opportunity to bring a fresh take to a now-classic coming-of-age story. (The new adaptation promised, at the expense of insulted millennials, to be “not your mother’s ‘Mean Girls’”). TikTok montages are forced into musical numbers, but the film has nothing new to say on how social media has played into the high school social dynamics at the story’s core.
Unlike the hit 2023 film “Barbie,” which managed to take a classic but problematic piece of intellectual property and tell a heartwarming and self-aware story, the new “Mean Girls” garbles its original message amidst all the bells and whistles.
Contrary to Cady’s iconic mathematical conclusion that “the limit does not exist,” the new film suggests that, when it comes to adaptations of strong original material, the limit might be two.
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Twitter: @jacob_wendler
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