Tina Fey's savvy new "Mean Girls" is a musical surprise that makes a charming argument for itself

In the recent trend of movie musicals being afraid to tell people that they are, in fact, musicals, “Mean Girls” might be the one with the least to worry about. Genuinely exciting in some ways while understandably stilted in some others, the end result of reviving a beloved film for a new adaptation ends up being a far savvier move than you might expect.

Though there are surprises to be found here in other ways, anyone familiar with the 2004 original “Mean Girls” will recognize the plot contours. After being homeschooled and living her formative years in Kenya, Cady Heron (Angourie Rice) has to navigate the treacherous social waters of North Shore High School. Helping her along the way are instant pals Janis 'Imi'ike (Auli?i Cravalho) and Damian Hubbard (Jaquel Spivey). When Cady catches the eye of school royalty Regina George (Reneé Rapp, reprising her Broadway work) and her coterie of Plastics (Bebe Wood as Gretchen Wieners, and Avantika as Karen Shetty), a plan emerges to flip the high school pecking order from the inside out.

Of course, all of this is delivered with the added flair from the recent stage musical, written once again by Tina Fey with songs by Nell Benjamin and Jeff Richmond. Credit directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. for taking full advantage and actually wanting to make a movie musical. The sequences blanketing school hallways aren’t cut to ribbons. There’s a genuine fluidity with the camera that takes advantage of the spaces on and off campus. Some really playful scene transitions make for a fun merging of stage and screen DNA. And the lively, ensemble-heavy choreography is personality-driven without being precious.

“Mean Girls” really finds its groove when it uses its predecessor as a suggestion rather than a template. There are a handful of scenes that play out with similar details, but whether by different performance choices, or the addition of one of those musical numbers, this largely avoids being a paint-by-numbers retelling. Two of the cast members that really help that happen are Spivey and Avantika. Karen’s Halloween number is exactly what you want from a musical version of this story: taking tiny details and building on them, in this case spinning the “sexy mouse” costume of the original  into a peppy treatise on what the holiday allows. It’s a much better alternative to fashioning those little observations into a repetitive, three-minute musical aside (a trap that some of the numbers in this movie do fall into.)

And then there’s Spivey, someone who buoys everything that is asked of Damian with confidence and charm. Like pretty much everyone else, he’s saddled with recreating some remnants of 2004, but the new contexts for some of his gossipy monologues and other storytelling duties give him a chance to really shine and make the role his own.

Maybe the shrewdest “Mean Girls” move here is to cut the original Cady voice-over. Here, Janis and Damian act as de facto narrators, checking in every once in a while to set up some new complication. But for the most part — either by cultural osmosis or by some savvy script changes —the backstory and internal monologue stuff isn’t as necessary this time around.

Given all of this new and genuine exciting energy, this “Mean Girls” does deflate whenever the obligatory nods to the original pop up. Some of these don’t even rise to the level of a callback and, many of the ported-over punchlines from North Shore High past feel like Bart apologetically “saying the line” to a classroom filled with eager, waiting students. It’s doubly disappointing when multiple of the most-quoted bits have more-than-capable alts that pop up in other parts of the movie.

Aside from the jokes that land flat when delivered the exact same way, the other big challenge facing this new “Mean Girls” is pacing. One of the enduring assets of the 2004 version is that it’s barely an hour and a half, delivered with a freight train momentum by usual high school comedy standards. Being a musical, this latest “Mean Girls” sometimes gets halted in its tracks just when it’s finding a groove. Janis and Damian’s revenge number or the aforementioned costume party celebration are brimming with the kind of energy that the one-location ballads often lack.

For all the self-imposed hurdles this project puts in its path, it’s surprising how many of them “Mean Girls” clears. Having Fey and Tim Meadows revisit their roles as North Shore staff members is a move that, in an alternate execution, could be drenched in cynicism and apathy. Yet, each seasoned pro finds something new to bring to this that isn’t just a verbatim rehashing of the same part they played two decades ago. Some of that comes from some reworked punchlines and line deliveries, but both seem to understand where the shifting energy of the movie is this time around.

That recognition is also true with the other adult characters here. Jenna Fischer is a welcome addition as Ms. Heron, as is Busy Philipps, who is taking a decidedly less cartoonish tack to being Regina‘s mom. 8

One of the successes of the original was crafting Regina George as a villain, sinister in her own way, but not at the expense of the playfulness underneath. It’s not that Rapp falls short here as Regina, but this conception of the character shows what maybe gets lost in transition from film to stage to film again. With Regina, this “Mean Girls” does so much extra work tossing in a few extra songs to set her up as a vicious force. Where its predecessor built up this character in a few fourth-wall breaks and a slow drip of intimidating details, having to halt the movie’s momentum to make a flashier case for why Cady should be wary doesn’t really work to anyone’s advantage. To some extent that process (combined with the shift in narrator) also leaves Rice drifting in the breeze a little bit, especially compared with the built-in meta narrative advantages that Lindsay Lohan had in her stint as Cady. Here, the slow transformation from undercover Plastic to the real thing is less a character arc and more “just a thing that happens in ‘Mean Girls.’”

But a new “Mean Girls” can withstand all that when it has an overall approach that rejects the feeling of a made-for-streaming nostalgia cash-in. Being a high school story set in 2024, adapting burn book culture for the social media age is a little inevitable. The aforementioned Karen Halloween number does a pretty admirable job at translating a TikTok aesthetic to a movie context in a non-annoying way. Even if the movie goes back to the “montage of posts” well one too many times, it’s still handled in a better way than most fake viral moments of its kind.

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And this is something that still has plenty of Fey’s fingerprints on it. Wouldn’t dream of ruining the surprises, but there are a handful of jokes in here that fit very neatly alongside some of her best work. This is a script that seems to understand and reflect other broader changes since the last iteration, with additions by subtraction that excise some of the cheaper low-hanging fruit.

Even with those new touches as an asset, this “Mean Girls” is something that doesn’t have to be reliant on them. Maybe the world didn’t need a two-decades-later recontextualizing of this story. Now that it’s here, though, it’s one that doesn’t wear out its welcome.

"Mean Girls" is in theaters Friday, Jan. 12.