I had not watched the original version of this film until a few years ago. I did enjoy that film quite a bit when I finally did watch it during the original DailyView. However, this version of Mean Girls is actually adapting the stage play that came after the movie. And, oh by the way, it is a musical, something that the promo material for this movie skipped over.

I do like musicals, and this works very nicely as a musical for this month’s Genre-ary. Unfortunately, I did not find this anywhere near as good as the original.

The story is very much similar. According to IMDB, ” New student Cady Heron (Angourie Rice) is welcomed into the top of the social food chain by the elite group of popular girls called “The Plastics,” ruled by the conniving queen bee Regina George (Reneé Rapp) and her minions Gretchen (Bebe Wood) and Karen (Avantika). However, when Cady makes the major misstep of falling for Regina’s ex-boyfriend Aaron Samuels (Christopher Briney), she finds herself prey in Regina’s crosshairs. As Cady sets to take down the group’s apex predator with the help of her outcast friends Janis (Auli’i Cravalho) and Damian (Jaquel Spivey), she must learn how to stay true to herself while navigating the most cutthroat jungle of all: high school.“

Oh, and you still need to watch out for those buses.

The problem is that I did not like any of these characters. I found them all to be just horribly rotten people who I did not want to spend time with. In the original film, I never felt that way and I could see the positives from all of them. Cady, Janis and Damian were meant to be the heroes of the film, I think, but they were every bit as horrible as the Plastics. Regina George was portrayed as the Devil so much that, though those scenes were fun to watch, made her into someone that you could not feel for. I just felt so much more negative toward all of these characters this time through that I felt no desire to root for them, which was not something I felt in the original.

The music was fun, for the most part. Perhaps nothing remarkably memorable, but catchy.

I had a problem with this movie, especially with the characters. It was nowhere close to the original. 

2.7 stars