For the second time in recent weeks, another popular-well-remembered-cult movie has been produced, this time "Mean Girls", first released in 2004. The hook once again is to remake the original as a musical to generate more interest. This is also the case with the recent remake of "The Color Purple" with both new movies starting as musicals on Broadway.
In every case, the idea behind remaking a well-known film is name recognition, and remaking the original as a musical is intended to bring in additional people because they are curious about the musical numbers. This idea might fail and succeed because there are a great many people who hate musicals but love the original film, and people who love musicals but hate the original Mean Girls. This movie, just like The Color Purple was very close to showing too many musical numbers, and unfortunately a high number of the musical numbers were not only not that good, but seemed unnecessary.
The reason why the Mean Girls movie from 2004 was so popular is that we all can relate to the cruel insanity of bullying that comes far too often with childhood. The lead bully Reginal George is about as cruel and vicious as they come. What is it about individuals like this, who derive so much sadistic pleasure from trashing and humiliating other human beings? Very often it is young girls who are far more cruel than young boys in middle school and high school. Bullying is a major problem around the world with too many young children committing suicide as a result.
There are several famous lines and scenes from the original movie that are repeated in this remake with three original cast members Tina Fey and Tim Meadows reprising their roles and Lindsay Lohan appearing at the end as a math contest moderator. What is the point of showing so many scenes from the original movie? Why not have a whole new series of new scenes and ideas, much funnier than the original? Then not worrying about disappointing the rabid fans of the 2004 version, who just want to see mostly the same movie again? Adding some musical numbers will never change a bad idea into a good one, regardless of any Broadway musical.
The new cast members, despite the musical numbers, were not as funny or effective as the original cast, including Angourie Rice as Cady Heron, Reneé Rapp as Regina George, and Avantika as Karen Shetty. While this entire new cast is not bad, they are also not different or funny enough to warrant any sense that this new version was worthy of the first film. I was surprised that after 20 years including a Broadway musical and so many script updates and rewrites this movie was at best, not funny enough, different enough, and only average. For all fans of the original Mean Girls, released in 2004, see that movie, because this new one is just not worth 2 hours of your time.
The Rotten Tomatoes rating for this film is a low 71%. I agree with this rating and do not recommend this movie.
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