Is Mean Girls Still “Grool”?

DISCLAIMER: This is an analysis of the 2004 original movie, the Broadway musical, and the new 2024 film. There will be spoilers.

CAUTION: Mention of eating disorders

When I heard that Renee Rapp was reprising her Broadway role as Regina George in the musical’s 2024 film adaptation, my expectations immediately sky-rocketed. I am typically skeptical of the endless revitalization of older IP to repackage for the nostalgic masses, and as much as I love the Mean Girls musical, it has always been a bit of a guilty pleasure. Some of the lyrics are laughably banal— “people forget I’m human too, yes they do that” comes to mind— but the highs are HIGH with fabulous belt-y numbers like “Someone Gets Hurt” and “World Burn”. However, I’ve been following Renee Rapp’s career since the Jimmy Awards and been an avid consumer of her various projects from Snow Angel to The Sex Lives of College Girls, and the knowledge that she was spearheading this new adaptation gave me confidence in the film’s vitality. This optimism, however, was diminished as the marketing rollout proceeded. Like the rest of the internet, I was disturbed by Olivia Rodrigo’s “get him back!” usurping any of the musical numbers in the initial trailer, and confused by the marketing strategy of “a new twist from Tina Fey”. It seemed the studio was trying to hide that this was, in fact, an adaptation of the Broadway musical, and frankly I’m still not sure what demographic they were trying to appeal to. Theatre kids were upset by the lack of music, and the general public was rolling their eyes at what appeared to be a rote revamp of a classic movie. Additionally, I was frustratingly underwhelmed by the Wednesday single drop of “World Burn”, Regina’s anthemic villain moment. The stage version is bombastic, big Broadway meets pop-rock heaven, but Rapp’s version was significantly scaled down, rooted far more in the sound she has developed for her own discography than the musical’s. The saving grace of the marketing campaign was the release of “Not My Fault”, a sexy, cheeky collaboration between Rapp and Megan Thee Stallion that I’ve had on repeat since it dropped. All of this being said, my hopes were high and my confidence was low as my sister and I walked into the theater on Friday night.

This film, however, blew my expectations out of the water. I loved it from beginning to end, and I was impressed by how distinct this film is from either of its two previous incarnations. If nothing else, I was expecting this movie to be a safer adaptation of the original, sanding the rough edges that made the 2004 film so biting but also somewhat controversial. This was seemingly evidenced by the omission of the lyric “Janis is a space d*ke!” from the “World Burn” single in favor of the considerably milder “Janis is a pyro-lez!” While I understood the desire to make this film more politically correct than its predecessor, my prevailing thought was… the film is called Mean Girls. Shouldn’t the girls be meaner?

As it turns out, if anything, Tina Fey went further with these characters, their arcs, and the repercussions of their actions than the original. To analyze two particuarly potent examples of this, I am going to dissect the direction Tina Fey took with the characters of Cady Heron and Regina George. One of the things I loved about this new take is that Cady has a significantly more drastic fall from grace. In the original, Lohan’s Cady certainly becomes shallow and self-centered, but she never rivals Regina’s cruelty. This time, however, Rice fully dons the crown of the Queen Bee. This is most evident in the rework of the scene when Regina shows up at the Plastics’ lunch table in sweatpants post Cady’s weight-gain sabotage (more on that later). In the original, the wounded Gretchen is the most vitriolic as she screeches, “You can’t sit with us!”. Regina looks to Cady for grace and Cady silently refuses to counter Gretchen. In this version, however, Gretchen and Karen are tentative in their rejection and look to Cady to make the decision. With a hair flip, a smirk, and an evil eye, Rice’s Cady rejects Regina as the entire school watches with cameras out. It is a truly transformational moment for Cady, and a genuinely heartbreaking one for Regina.

This brings me to Renee Rapp’s absolutely breathtaking performance as Regina George in this film. We are introduced to her with the drawling “Meet the Plastics”— undoubtedly my favorite musical moment of the film— and in an almost erotic dream-like sequence, Cady watches a leather-clad Regina sing, “I’m the prettiest poison you’ve ever seen / that filter you use looks just like me.” (As a side note, this is one of multiple moments between Cady and Regina that feel almost sapphic— but canonically, both characters remain ostensibly straight.) What is so distinctive about Rapp’s portrayal of this classic character is capturing the iconic c*nty energy of Regina (though her edges have been sanded), while also bringing a humanity to her I had never recognized in the original. This is most prominent in the more serious approach the film takes to Cady’s weight-gain scheme. In the original, Janis convinces Cady to destroy Regina’s “conventionally hot body” by giving her weight-gain energy bars under the guise of helping Regina “lose three pounds.” While this is played exclusively for laughs in the 2004 iteration (the prom dress and “watch it, fat ass!” come to mind), there has been discourse over whether Regina actually has an eating disorder. Throughout the entire movie, she’s obsessive about her weight, checking calories constantly (even if she just ends up getting cheese fries instead), and hugely disturbed by her weight gain to the point that Cady has to double down on her lie and claim the bars make you bloat and then lose weight practically overnight. While this remains an unresolved question in the new movie, there are two absolutely heart-wrenching scenes that Renee Rapp just plays differently. In the afore-mentioned lunch scene, my stomach dropped for Regina. She was so clearly embarrassed by the sweatpants and crushed by the Plastics’ rejection of her. As she exits, she tells the rapt lunchroom to go ahead and film her because it will last longer. Cady’s outright cruelty in this scene because of a situation she devised is actually sickening and easily the lowest she stoops in the film. Rapp, however, still has an even more painful scene to come. In the original, Regina learns about Cady’s scheme when she is driving around with her hot-to-trot boyfriend, pissed off that she was excluded from Cady’s Friday night house party. Her boyfriend says he hates those bars because his coach forces the team to eat them when he wants them to “move up a weight class.” Regina has her iconic scream and creates her own page in the Burn Book to exact revenge on Cady. Again, pretty light-hearted and played for laughs. In this version, Regina is home alone on that Friday night, chomping on the bars and running continuously on the treadmill. When her mom comes in to check on her, she is surprised Regina is “still” running. Regina learns about the bars from her mom and instead of immediately launching into an overdramatic wail, Rapp’s face just falls and she nearly comes to the point of tears. She then proceeds to launch into something akin to Rachel McAdams’ hysterical scream, which saves the scene from being completely devastating. This choice was incredibly moving and so dramaturgically and emotionally sound. On a purely academic level, these scenes raised the stakes of the film and made the titular cruelty of these characters so much more potent. However, perhaps more importantly, I think this was a necessary update to an almost disturbingly nonchalant approach in the original movie. The writing of this plot line rings true, and it adds an emotional rawness to the material the original lacked.

Zooming out, there are so many other choices in this movie that were so well-executed. In my opinion, pretty much everything about Janis and Damian’s characters are actually improved upon in this adaptation. Janis, whose plot line in both films revolves around wanting to get back at Regina for exploiting her sexuality, no longer pulls a Catch 22 and ends up with a man at the end (thank God!). Auli’i Carvalho’s “I’d Rather Be Me”— despite still making no sense as a self-righteously moralizing song sung by a blatantly immoral character— is a musical highlight, and she ends up with some more substantial character development than her 2004 counterpart. Jaquel Spivey, whose breakout performance as Usher in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway musical “A Strange Loop” won him a Tony, is a film highlight as Damian. He is flamboyant, sassy, and takes no shit, milking every comedic beat for all it’s worth. It is a TRAGEDY he does not have a stand-alone musical moment, but in fairness, Damian’s songs were always going to be first on the chopping block for a movie adaptation, as they are neither particularly memorable or super helpful in advancing the plot. However, he has several duets with Cravalho such as “A Cautionary Tale” and “Revenge Party”. My sister and I both screamed in the theater (to be clear, it was a very energetic audience) when Damian ended up with his crush at the Spring Fling. The early 2000s were branded by the “token gay friend” characters who were “aesthetically gay” but chronically partner-less, and even though there is nothing inherently wrong with this, it was exciting to see Damian finally break out of that mold.

This “new twist” also does not leave you wanting fresh material. While many of the original jokes are retained (eg. “on Wednesdays, we wear pink”), they are not played for laughs, but to reference the iconic moments of the original. Instead, Tina Fey has written a host of new jokes and gags that conjure the spirit of the original’s humor, while also bringing something fresh and unexpected to the audience. Other times, Fey puts a twist on a joke we already know well to make it hilarious yet again— for example, when Cady asks Janis and Damian if they have anything pink, Janis groans “NO” and Damian simultaneously says, “Yes! What shade?”

Ironically, the most underwhelming aspect of this musical movie is… well, the music. As I’ve already mentioned, even the Broadway adaptation of Mean Girls does not have the strongest score. The lyrics at times are almost offensively insipid and instead of adopting the witty intelligence of the characters in the original movie, they dumb them down. While there are some really great melodies from Jeff Richmond, there are also quite a few skips, which can make the musical feel overstuffed. The good news is most of the clunkers were cut in the winnowing process for this film— “Where Do You Belong?”, “Fearless”, “Stop”, “Whose House Is This?”, “More Is Better”, “Do This Thing”, and various reprises from the original score are all missing from this iteration. There are moments I missed— I would have loved to hear Jaquel Spivey’s “Where Do You Belong?” and the reprises of both “Stupid With Love” and “What’s Wrong With Me?” have some of my favorite lyrics in the score— but on the whole, I think cutting down the track list was a wise decision. However, if you had told me when “World Burn” was released that it would be among the most faithful recreations in this film, I would have been shocked. “A Cautionary Tale” was a strong opening, immediately followed by a new I Want song for Cady, “What Ifs”. Cowritten by the musical’s writers Nell Benjamin and Jeff Richmond and Renee Rapp, it follows basically the same trajectory as the musical’s “It Roars” with vaguer lyrics and a softer delivery that doesn’t require the same vocal prowess from Angourie Rice. This introduction is disappointingly generic (though in all fairness, we do learn she is from Kenya this time instead of just referencing the continent) and almost feels like a pre-written pop song that was intended to be released widely as a single with mass appeal. After the very faithful musical highlight of Rapp singing “Meet the Plastics”, the next musical moment is Rice singing a very soft-pop (with Glee influences?) rendition of “Stupid With Love”. At this point, it became very clear to me that this movie would be taking significant liberties with the original score to make it feel like a pop album. Rice has a very sweet voice but it was ultimately a little jarring to hear such a different interpretation of this song. Bebe Wood singing “What’s Wrong With Me?” was another highlight— her wistful voice brought a melancholy to the song that was very affecting. We got a dance pop (and unnecessarily auto-tuned) “Apex Predator”, a pastel “Revenge Party”, and a showstopper with “Sexy”, headed by Avantika’s Karen in a GRWM video. “Someone Gets Hurt” was another (unintentionally?) queer-coded moment between Regina and Cady, and though it lacked its signature high belt, it told the story well within the context of the film. The final number, “I See Stars”, was sung by Angourie Rice and she pulled out all the stops— belting and riffing in a way that made me wonder why we hadn’t heard that from her previously.

All in all, I was incredibly impressed by how this Mean Girls remained relevant, fresh, and hilarious. While it was very much marketed as The Renee Rapp Show, the ensemble cast was incredibly talented, each bringing a distinctive vitality to their iconic roles. So… get in, loser, we’re going to the movies.