Mean Girls (2024)

 

Genre: Musical/ Comedy

Time: 1h 52mins

Directors:  Samantha Jayne, Arturo Perez Jr.

Quick Summary: Cady Heron is a hit with the Plastics, an A-list girl clique at her new school. But everything changes when she makes the mistake of falling for Aaron Samuels, the ex-boyfriend of alpha Plastic Regina George.

I lost it when the 0.5 selfie angle came on screen.

Please, stop making films that are directed towards Gen Z but are made by boomers. It feels a little offensive I'm not going to lie to watch these kids that strangely look like adults, prance around saying "slay" and "rizz" every 5 minutes. 

A lot of the comedy was lost in this version. I just don't know if maybe I don't find Gen Z humour funny, or this isn't funny. All the sexual jokes, bitch fests and cunty nature of the original just aren't here. I don't think I heard one slur, which is strange to complain about, but that's what made it so funny originally to hear these things so casually. 

I am aware that basically half the songs were cut out of this to keep the runtime short. The issue is, that these songs are bland and terrible. They're poorly choreographed too. One song literally pauses to show this horrendous twerking-styled dance with horrible basey dance music and the singing is adjusted to sound deeper. Another we get the glorious 0.5 selfie angle camera shot of the main girl's forehead while she's singing which I don't know if I laughed because it was funny or because it was bad. Going back to the songs in general. Eh. I didn't care for them much. Regina was supposed to be super cool and sexy wow but her tone just sounds so droney and has no life in it at all. Like I get that she's supposed to come across as mysterious and a hard-ass bitch, but her songs were just boring and dull to listen to as she slinks around the scene. 

There were these really strange moments too when a song was about to start, these characters would just stop, snap their neck to look in another direction and start singing randomly. It was honestly really jarring and a little scary at times, though it did get a few laughs out of me. The vocals also sounded really fake, which I don't think helped at all. 

I still don't know if I found this funny or so bad it's funny. It feels like it's trying to be a big grand spectacle of Gen Z culture, without stepping on any toes or offending anyone, but they chose the trending memes at the time but then also didn't really understand why they were funny in the first place. 

As for the clothing. Eh, honestly it looks like they bought loads of trending clothes from Shien and randomly handed them out. Maybe I'm not one for popular fashion but none of the outfits looked that good. Some looked uncomfortable actually. This plus the E.L.F makeup product placement blatantly being shown every five minutes. By blatantly, I mean holding the product to the camera for a solid 10 seconds before using it too. 

I'd recommend you give this a miss, but I could be wrong. This could be funny and it's just not my sense of humour. But that doesn't change the fact the story is terrible and just not the same. It doesn't work trying to get us to sympathise with all these characters and cram in all these little backstories, almost as if it's trying to teach kids that everyone has their demons. But maybe I'm old and have no sense of humour, or this is too fluffy and wants to play it safe.

3/10

"Gretchen Wieners: Why are you dressed so scary?

Cady Heron: It's Halloween.

Gretchen Wieners: Cady, if you don't dress slutty, that is slut-shaming us."

"Gretchen Wieners: What are you thinking about?

Jason Weems: Chicken wings later."