The high school comedy of status-sadism now reaches the same third life-cycle stage already achieved by Hairspray, The Producers and The Color Purple: the movie, the stage musical version and then the movie version of that. My own dissident reaction to the 2004 original was a mean review based on feeling it was inferior to Clueless, Election and 10 Things I Hate About You, and that it had its cake and ate it on the prettiness-fascism issue.
But I could have paid more attention to the showstopping individually funny lines; screenwriter Tina Fey after all went on to create an authentic masterpiece with TV’s 30 Rock, in which she could more successfully represent in her own person the eternal Mean Girls themes of reconciling success with kindness. Moreover the Broadway Mean Girls was a big improvement on the film because the musical genre makes everything more amusingly histrionic – the “diva” theme made explicit – and this movie version succeeds in the same way, although like the subsequent movie iteration it sags in the over-extended third act.
Angourie Rice takes the role first played by Lindsay Lohan: she is sweet, unworldly teen Cady, once homeschooled by her academic mom in Kenya, and now relocated to the United States and having to fit in at high school where everyone is suspicious of this gawky (but beautiful) nerd. Fey reprises her role as maths teacher Ms Norbury, Jon Hamm plays an embarrassing sports-coach-slash-sexual-relations-counsellor – and there’s another iconic cameo.
In the time-honoured manner, newbie Cady is taken in hand and guided through the high-school jungle by the all-knowing alienated cynical types; great work here from Jaquel Spivey as Damian and Auli’i Cravalho as Janis. They are also the movie choric narrators, bringing us into the action as if it is a 112-minute TikTok in a smartphone-shaped screen. Damian and Janis, outside the hetero-patriarchal power structure, are in an objective position to show wide-eyed Cady all the various in-crowds and power-bases, of which naturally the most fearsome are the terrifying “plastics”, the mean girls and Insta-princesses who rule the school.
They are in turn ruled by the pouting queen of capricious blonde cruelty Regina, originally played by Rachel McAdams and now by Renée Rapp. It amuses Regina to pretend to welcome Cady into their group and Janis (who has history with Regina) encourages Cady to go along with it and infiltrate this hateful group - but could it be that Cady will like being a shallow blonde “plastic”? Among the mean girls themselves, the scene is stolen by Avantika Vantanapu as the outrageously vapid Karen; she gets the movie’s best song, Sexy, in the Halloween party scene. Busy Phillips is funny as Regina’s needy mom who wants to be one of her daughter’s gang more than anything.
There are plenty of laughs and fun along the way, but the business invoking framing Ms Norbury as a drug-pusher always feels strained and unconvincing, with insufficient laughs to make it worthwhile, while the final resolution and Cady’s learning of life-lessons take a while to arrive. Some sugar-rush musical numbers, though, and the classic gags are effectively delivered.
• Mean Girls is released on 11 Janaury in Australia, 12 January in the US and 17 January in the UK.
