The Mean Girls remake was fine. It wasn’t a particularly good movie, but I had fun with it for the hour and a half I was in the theatre. All in all, it’s a pretty solid, inoffensive 6 or 7/10. Despite this, I can’t help but feel a little disappointed at how underwhelming it was.
The original Mean Girls is about as close to a masterpiece as you can get from 2000s teen comedies, yet the remake is entirely forgettable.
Of course it should be noted that Avantika and Jaquel Spivey carry the movie as Karen and Damien, respectively, every scene each is in they absolutely steal. Karen especially spends most of the film with the most gloriously stupefied looks plastered on her incredibly emotive face, making it a treat to keep watching just to see what expression she will muster up next. Damien is still wise cracking and sardonic queen; however some of his sassy meanness is cut down, and unfortunately this extends to most of the films’ characters.
The sanitization is admittedly a bit annoying. In the original, there is an iconic scene where someone explains that joining the mathletes is social suicide, whereas in the remake the line is switched to “socially calamitous.” Several lines also meet this butchering. I’m not necessarily annoyed at these changes, it just feels odd to recreate an entire scene word for word, shot for shot, only to add a hint of corporatization.
It isn’t all bad though, the film is one full of energy, constantly in movement. The camera swings around the characters elegantly, even in the midst of well-choreographed dances placing the audience directly inside them, allowing for a much more dynamic experience. However, this method of favouring the cinematic over the theatrical comes with a few cons, especially when it comes to the more emotional songs. No one sings with feeling, they make angry faces but their voices are so clean and produced that it never matches, despite how synced upon they are and how fun and surreal many of the musical sections are, it never feels right. The overly technical, unemotive voices never quite fit with the emotions depicted by the actors. It feels strangely dubbed.
Another rather upsetting detail is just how terrible the costumes are. Regina George, played by Reneé Rapp, at one point sports a pink top that operates within the vicinity of absolute atrocity. Instead of going for trendy and fitting Y2K revival looks, or just something that looks decent, they opted to choose clothes that are popular with teenagers nowadays, which just comes across as horribly unflattering.
As nice as it is seeing some of the iconic scenes recreated almost exactly, there was no reason to keep the script almost exactly the same plus intense amounts of sandpapering. None of this is even to say the movie is bad, there’s more things I enjoyed than I didn’t. I’m not even opposed to remakes, I think the Colin Farrell Total Recall is better than the original, but it all just feels unnecessary and that’s what’s so painful about it.
If you are a hardcore fan of the movie or musical, if you’re just looking to kill some time and leave the theatre with a warm, if somewhat shallow smile, then give Mean Girls a shot, it really isn’t as miserable as this review paints it. It’s really hard to write an overly positive review about something you think is just fine.
It’s a tragedy that something as culturally important as Mean Girls has been reduced to a smooth-surfaced, perfectly innocuous, un-boat-rockable Saturday night movie. Where’s the bite?
