Yahoo Finance Mean Girls film review: On Wednesdays we get whiplash
Mean Girls film review and star rating: ★★★
In the least surprising news you’ll hear all year, surveys are showing that Gen Z have short attention spans, due, almost certainly, to social media. Who’s got ten minutes to watch YouTube when you can blitz through the same information on TikTok in 30 seconds? Publishers are capitalising on the rush; YouTube Shorts, a relatively new kid to the party, is doing what TikTok does, condensing the platform’s minutes-long videos into seconds.
Amid this narrative you’d be forgiven for thinking feature length films would be chicken feed by this point, and watching the new Mean Girls reboot, that dystopian future doesn’t feel far off. It’s a whiplash-inducing one hour 40 minutes where not a second goes by without thirty five different things happening at once, from chaotic camera shots of someone’s shoulder to sing-a-long moments and repetition of the 2004 classic’s most quoted lines.
On Wednesdays they still wear pink and Gretchen Wieners is still trying to make fetch happen. (Regina George still insists it won’t.) If the OG Mean Girls slipped past you, there’s nothing here for you, but if you liked or loved the original, you’ll probably be pleased to see essentially that film again with a more of a diverse cast. That’s fine, like going on holiday to the same place every year is fine, if you like that kind of thing.
We’re back at the same Illinois high school from the Lindsay Lohan turn, with the same set up: humble newbie Cady Heron piques the interest of ‘plastic’ Regina George,’ one of the popular girls, who manages to coerce her into being one of her underlings. That’s until Regina’s toxicity (they wouldn’t have called it that in 2004!) becomes so blatant that Cady (now toxic herself) takes revenge. It’s about how oppression is systemic in schools and how when we’re young we’re super impressionable. Get it?
It’s mostly a lovely wash of bright characters, brighter clothing than before (Gen Z likes bright colours, don’t you know?) and some passable songs. (Yep, there’s singing this time.) The story’s strength was always its well-sketched characters, and at its best, Mean Girls V2 amps those colours up to saturation point. The chemistry between Weiners, George and Karen Smith actors Reneé Rapp, Bebe Wood and Karen Shetty brings fresh shade to three of the murkiest queens in the high school universe.
They’re often funny and always impeccably styled. Particularly so, Rapp’s Regina George, who comes across as no cartoon villain: she’s the real thing. Other returner characters feel less fresh. Busy Phillips’ ‘cool mum’ is too much of an homage to Amy Poehler’s 2004 iteration, and Auli’i Cravalho’s Janis, who is famously “too gay to function”, doesn’t get the opportunity to take the character to newer, queerer pastures. Angourie Rice is a better actor than Lindsay Lohan, but then again, Lohan has a sweetness that Oscar winners can’t dream of mimicking.
Stats say younger generations today are not what they were in 2004. They are more environmentally aware, drinking less, and searching for more ‘authentic’ experiences, whatever that means. But the dizzying hierarchies of the school playground are as inevitable as this Mean Girls reboot, which gives exactly what they want.
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