Mean Girls PEOPLE Review: Reneé Rapp Is Fetch (and Then Some!) in Musical Reboot of Lindsay Lohan Comedy

Unlike the new one Color purple, musical version Mean girls it doesn’t deepen or enrich the original film, a hit 2004 comedy that featured Tina Fey’s expertly crafted script of jokes and pop references, as well as one of Lindsay Lohan’s most endearing performances.

Oh, Lindsay, Lindsay, Lindsay! After all these years, your name still lights a flame in the poetic mind – to rhyme those two syllables, set to music, anything!

Then again, how deep or rich should a musical be Mean girls it must be?

Let’s go back for a moment. It should be said that he is the first bad girls, inspired by the publicist book of parental advice called Queen Bees and Wannabes, it had a compact, sharp-angled neatness that forced you to overlook the underlying cruelty of its tale of high school rivalry, betrayal, humiliation and intimidation.

You could think of it as a vehicle that, if you’re forced to go through the adolescent nightmare of taking your driving test again, can parallel park without a problem.

Here’s how you know the cast of 2024 Mean girls Movie

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In its easy way, original Mean girls it also suggested something of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s famous observation: “High school is closer to the heart of the American experience than anything else I can think of.” (Elections, of course, it is the purest cinematic realization of that thought. )

This new bad girls, but it’s more like an SUV that keeps running over curbs and knocking over mailboxes. Granted, much of the material is the same, just with seemingly clever updates.

A straight line that once depended on Ladysmith Black Mambazo now depends on Neil deGrasse Tyson. It was laughing then, it is smiling now. But modern musical-comedy conventions, or at least those imported here from hit Broadway productions, are not subtle. Go big, as they say, or go home.

The film culminates in a body-shaming incident that verges on a sadistic joke. The scene isn’t necessarily meant to be funny (or is it?), but it’s confusing. If anything, Mean girls it makes you appreciate the skill that went into creating the bizarre and provocatively primitive Dicks: The Musical.

Mean girls New York premieres: see all the stars on the red carpet

Jaquel Spivey, Angourie Rice and Auli’i Cravalho.

Jojo Whilden/Paramount

Mare of Eastown’with Angourie Rice, giving off a freshly scrubbed Amy Adams vibe, takes on the role of Cady Heron, a high school student who spent years in the wilds of Africa. Although he is more at sea in this adolescent society than Brittany Murphy’s Tai was without knowledge Cady somehow wins the approval of the “Plastics” – a clique of mean, glamorous girls led by a blonde monster named Regina George (Reneé Rapp).

Encouraged by two other marginalized students (Auli’i Cravalho and Jaquel Spivey), Cady plans to undermine Regina and her assistants – a covert operation of sorts – but she herself ends up as recklessly plastic as Barbie.

Although, thanks to Greta Gerwig’s gestalt-defining film comedy, we now know that Mattel’s doll has philosophical curiosity and depth. You could have called Hannah Arendt “Barbie” and she might have thanked you. Time really does to change.

Besides, shallowness isn’t always a bad thing either—not when it’s embodied by the utterly fantastic Reneé Rapp as Regina, anyway. Rapp, who also worked on the show’s stage production, plays Regina with a combination of deadly sexual command and — briefly, anyway — a conquering vulnerability. Ripely delicious and rather absurd, Rapp suggests a combination Smash’s Megan Hilty and Sharon Stone.

Original cast: Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Seyfried, Lacey Chabert and Rachel McAdams. CBS via Getty Images

Compared to her, everyone else — including Avantika and Bebe Wood as the other Plastics; Fey and Tim Meadows, reprising their roles as faculty members; even Busy Philipps as the “cool mom” played by Amy Poehler in the first film – falls and falls, like chalk cliffs endlessly battered by a rough sea.

The musical numbers are mostly bright, brash and often awful. The songs are just waiting for you, spinning noisily at speed and determined to achieve maximum impact. It’s dodgeball in PE class again.

Mean girls is in theaters on Friday.

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Source: HIS Education