My oldest niece will be going into high school when the next school year begins in August.  It is a strange thought.  Over the years, I have tried to do my part in providing a good example to her, hoping that in some small way I can help guide her on the right path.  One of the first things I said to her as we were leaving the theater was that I sincerely hope that her high school experience is nothing like Mean Girls (2024).  That might seem like a ridiculous statement, and I did intend some humor in it.  Still, the film has the conceit to say that it is based, in a manner of speaking, on reality.  I mean, people around me do not randomly break into song to expound ad nauseum on current events, thankfully.  Rather, it claims that everyone has it in them to be cruel and do the worst things imaginable, not just to the people with whom we are unfriendly, but to those closest to us.  My initial reaction to this idea was to reject it outright.  Yet, that would suggest that I have never been nasty towards a loved one, which is not true, unfortunately.  Already, this is getting complicated, so hopefully the rest of this review will unpack it all.

Janis ‘Imi’ike (Auli’i Cravalho) and Damian Hubbard (Jaquel Spivey) bring us into Mean Girls.  They are major characters, but the story is told through them checking in at the beginning of each act of this musical.  They introduce the person who will be the catalyst for everything you are about to see (or read about), Cady Heron (Angourie Rice).  She lives in Kenya with her mother (Jenna Fischer), and Ms. Heron begins to feel that their time in Africa is not giving Cady the social interaction the young lady needs.  Thus, she accepts a position at Northwestern, and Cady enters her junior year at North Shore High School.  In classic new kid, new school fashion, she has trouble navigating the hierarchy.  Walking through the cafeteria, she is unable to get a seat and takes her lunch to the bathroom.  Damian and Janis notice this, and decide to help.  Upon bringing Cady back into the lunch room, the two veterans of the school begin pointing out all the different groups and their function.  The last discussed are the so-called “Plastics,” which is Janis’ name for them because they are, to her, fake and shiny.  This description is prompted by the entrance of Regina George (Renée Rapp), the leader of the Plastics and the person to which the entire school bows.  Once Regina takes her place, she notices Cady staring at her, and requests that this fresh face come over to their table.  For whatever reason, the most popular girl is taking interest in a nobody.  Once this exchange is complete, with an invitation to eat lunch with them for the rest of the week, Cady returns to a surprised Damian and Janis.  Janis and Regina have a history, once being friends when they were in middle school, but they had a brutal falling out.  Thus, Janis wants information so that she can take her enemy down a peg or two.  Cady goes along with it because she is happy to have friends in a strange environment.  She is fine playing along until things get personal.  Among the many new experiences for Cady is her crush on the guy she sits behind in math class, Aaron Samuels (Christopher Briney).  She spends weeks trying to figure out ways for him to get to notice her, including purposely doing poorly on her work so that he would volunteer to tutor her.  The real breakthrough comes when he invites her to his Halloween party.  Despite the rules the Plastics have about how they dress, she comes in a scary costume instead of . . . well, what adults seem to find acceptable for such attire.  Regina uses this opportunity to step between Aaron and Cady, kissing him in front of Cady just because she knows her supposed friend likes him.  Because of this, Cady fully commits herself to getting revenge on Regina.  Most of this is petty stuff, like giving Regina snack bars that she claims help lose weight but do the opposite, and gifting her facial cream filled with lard.  The bigger stuff comes when Regina face plants on the stage during their Christmas talent show recital, which allows Cady the opportunity to supplant Regina in popularity.  It also does not help that Regina discovers the truth about the snack bars, and how Cady had told Aaron about Regina’s infidelities.  Yet, instead being satisfied with her victory, Cady decides to lean into her new role at the top of the social pecking order.  Rather than going to an art show with Damian and Janis, or to see Neil deGrasse Tyson with her mom as promised, Cady has a party at her house and invites Aaron.  Yet, Aaron does not recognize who Cady has become.  The same can be said of Damian and Janis, who confront Cady for her lying.  The final blow comes when Regina leaves their so-called “Burn Book,” a journal of all the terrible thoughts they have about people at school, for others to see, being careful to write something about herself in it.  The resulting chaos prompts the school to gather all the juniors, and they are told by Ms. Norbury (Tina Fey), the math teacher, to put aside their differences.  Cady is already feeling horribly, but tries to make amends with Regina, only to be right there when Regina gets hit by a bus as their argument spills out onto the school grounds.  Cady is also in a lot of trouble, but Ms. Norbury gives her a way out offering for the math whiz to join the Mathletes.  While everyone else is preparing for the Spring Fling, she is helping their school take home the state championship.  Nonetheless, her and her teammates make it to the dance, where she is unexpectedly named queen.  It gives her the opportunity to apologize to everyone for her behavior, and this is where the film ends.

I went back and read my review of the original Mean Girls (2004) after writing my synopsis of the 2024 rendition.  Even though this latest one is a musical, the plots are basically the same.  I suppose this is to be expected.  What I do not understand is the “why.”  Why did this movie have to be made?  I can think of few people to whom I have spoken, in any setting, about the first iteration who have said that they did not like it.  Even I did, and as my write up reminded me, and this is something I did not expect.  Thus, not only did the make the odd choice of remaking a classic after only twenty years passing since the first production, they made it into a musical.  I get that my distaste for this genre is not universal. All the same, I remain perplexed as to why there exists a mode of storytelling whereby songs are inserted that only repeat the central theme of a scene for many minutes longer than is needed.  But that is only my take on the matter.  More specifically, I do understand the need to remake something that few think was bad, or one that is still relatively fresh in people’s minds.  I mean, they filmed another version of Psycho (1998) nearly forty years after the first one, and that is definitely a movie that did not need an update.  Like its Hitchcock cousin (distant and several times removed), Mean Girls (2024) fails almost completely to deliver on the charm of the original.  Please note that this is not the argument of a bitter, aging man trying to tell you that things were better back in the day.  What this update seemed to go for was the plastic, opting for shiny over the substance of the first.

As I drove home from seeing Mean Girls and pondered phrases like the sentence I just wrote, it made me think about the criticisms and ideas I put forward in the paragraph.  Is it mean of me to say that the new version is not as good as the original?  To put it in the context of the film, am I just as plastic as Regina?  The word “plastic” is an interesting one in this context.  It is a substance that can be molded, but is rigid when set.  This is an apt description of the process Cady undergoes.  The fact that it is fake goes without saying, but it is the transformation in which I am most interested as a Catholic.  God asks us to have open hearts to Him, indeed, that our souls be conformed to Him.  On the surface, this does not sound all that different to what happens in the film.  Yet, the similarities end when you consider that God has only your benefit in mind.  The movie is about climbing social ladders and not caring about who you step on in order to achieve your goals.  In a sense, I do this with my reviews.  I did not care for this movie, but I am sure that the people that made it put a lot of hard work into its production.  I find it to be part and parcel of a society that is increasingly morally bankrupt, and yet I can be seen as the bad guy for holding up such a mirror.  There is a better, more Christ-like way of winning people over, and it does not involve Burn Books or getting even with people we think wronged us.  Instead, it takes the courage to forgive, which is something the movie does discuss.  Jesus did this as He was being led to his execution, pardoning those that sought to destroy His earthly body.  Forgiveness is the first step for reconciliation, which was the purpose of Jesus’ mission on earth, and where the film lands.  I may not have enjoyed the journey, but the result is acceptable.

At the same time, I cannot excuse the material in Mean Girls.  The culture and images on display are often inappropriate, and I will continue to battle them.  I just hope that my tactics can win people to Christ because that is ultimately what gets me out of bed every day.  I could go easy on these films, but it is also Scriptural to speak the truth in love.