Mean Girls: New film struggles with 'muzzled' humour and 'awkward' music, critics say

The new Mean Girls movie has divided critics, with some saying jokes have lost their edge due to script updates.

The new film is an adaptation of the successful stage musical, which was itself based on the hit 2004 film.

Entertainment Weekly said "life with the Plastics pretty darn fantastic", but the Hollywood Reporter described the film as a "tuneless mess".

Many of the original movie's jokes and characters have been updated because of changes in attitudes and teen culture.

"It's come to no-one's surprise that jokes have changed," screenwriter Tina Fey told the New York Times recently. "You don't poke in the way that you used to poke.

"Even if your intention was always the same, it's just not how you do it any more, which is fine. I very much believe that you can find new ways to do jokes with less accidental shrapnel sideways."

Referring to the film's queen of mean Regina George, Fey added: "I know that even Regina would know what wouldn't fly. She's going to find a way to inflict pain on people, but she's not going to get herself in trouble."

Entertainment Weekly's Maureen Lee Lenker gave the film a positive B score, praising the changes to the script in an era of "more inclusivity and acceptance" but noting one side effect being that the story has lost some of its potency.

"Though the core story remains the same, Fey wisely updates the script for a new generation of teens," she wrote. "Social changes, particularly the absolute chokehold that social media has on pop culture and the lives of teenagers, are integrated into the plot seamlessly."

But, she added: "Part of the genius of the original Mean Girls was how it captured the downright viciousness of teenage girls, and some of that predatory bite has been muzzled here."

The original Mean Girls starred Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams, and was later adapted into a stage musical.

The musical is the basis for the new film and means, unlike the earlier screen version, the 2024 Mean Girls movie features songs - something that was not made clear in the trailer.

"All the effervescence and fun have been drained out of the material in this laboured reincarnation, a movie musical made by people who appear to have zero understanding of movie-musical vernacular," wrote The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney.

"The songs seldom spring organically from the story and more often feel so awkwardly shoehorned in that you come to dread them."

He added: "On stage, Regina strutted into every scene like a Bond vixen, bathed in a pink glow that made both her beauty and her cruelty seem almost otherworldly. Here, she's nasty but seldom funny, perhaps reflecting a shift in the culture that now makes it harder to milk comedy out of bullying snark."

The new adaptation of Mean Girls stars Angourie Rice, Reneé Rapp, Auliʻi Cravalho, Christopher Briney and Busy Philipps, while Fey reprises her role as Ms Norbury.

Justin Chang of the LA Times said the decision to have some of the songs "mediated by the screens and filters of social media" results in a film that feels more like "Meme Girls".

"Why does it all feel so laborious and overworked, so frantically self-regarding?" he asked. "It has something to do with the insipid quality of the songs, none of which threaten to lodge themselves in your brain the way the first movie's lines so effortlessly do."

Rolling Stone's David Fear agreed. "The fact that the directors lean heavily on TikTok stylistics and faux-phone recordings for a lot of their numbers makes sense on the page, since that's how so much musical content gets created and consumed these days," he said.

"By the time that trope gets used for the gajillionth time during a musical number that would have benefited from a bit more visual breathing room, however, you start to feel like it's become a crutch."

But there was more enthusiasm from Empire's Catherine Bray, who awarded the film four stars.

"While it might feel like nu-Mean Girls comes with a lot of sparkly pink baggage attached, in the event, from the zippy opening prologue number onwards, it's very much a case of speedy boarding onto a first-class flight of fancy that requires zero familiarity with previous incarnations, but which manages to simultaneously reward loyalists with some decent inside jokes."

The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw awarded the film three stars, noting there were "plenty of laughs and fun along the way".

"The Broadway Mean Girls was a big improvement on the film," he said, "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."

He added: "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."

Deadline's Valerie Complex concluded the movie "struggles to shine in the shadow of its predecessor" and lacks "a cohesive and engaging narrative".

"[It] ultimately falters in delivering a coherent, impactful story that offers little new or compelling," she wrote. "The 2004 film has cemented its place in cinema and pop culture, while the 2024 version is likely to be forgotten."

Speaking about how society had changed in recent decades, Fey told the New York Times: "If we really had people speak to each other the way they spoke to each other in 1990, everyone would go to the hospital. People were really rough.

"People are still horrible, they're just more likely to anonymously type it. I would like to take but not teach a graduate school class on the ways in which people are just as divisive and horrible as they ever were, but now they couch it in virtue."

The film will be released in the UK on Friday 19 January.