REVIEW: Mean Girls - deliciously bitchy, enormously fun

Mean Girls – just as the original did – offers a deliciously-entertaining descent into all-out bitchiness, swiftly, predictably and thank goodness followed by some rapid redemption – the latest in an impressive run of films to get 2024 under way. Do you have to have watched Mean Girls mark one all those years ago to watch this now? Certainly not, and nor do you have to remember it. Two decades later, it’s a total blur as far as I am concerned. You might just enjoy wallowing in the references and the clevernesses, but the fact is that Mean Girls 2024-style absolutely stands on its own, just as any decent film should – and in fact, it’s a cracker.

In truth, it takes a little while to get into, seeming just a bit contrived and trivial to start with, but slowly it gets its grips into you and by the end you really don’t want it to finish – a stylish, vibrant celebration of meanness… and of the decency which might just be your destination the other side.

Angourie Rice is unworldly Cady who walks into the lion’s den of high school. Home-schooled by her mum and fresh from living in Kenya, she’s instantly out of her depth, and even though she’s got the caring, if rather cynical, pairing of Jaquel Spivey as Damian and Auli’i Cravalho as Janis, to guide her, she finds herself, slightly oddly, gravitating towards the so-called “plastics” amid the myriad cliques – the girls who are hard and cold, the girls led by Queen Bee Regina, spicily, sparkily and stroppily played by Renée Rapp. And it’s under Regina’s influence that, having tumbled for Regina’s ex, sweet innocent Cady is corrupted, the evils of bitchiness, plasticising her in turn. Much of it centres on a bitchy book in which foul comments are tossed off without thought for the consequences or the hurt they will inevitably cause if discovered.

Meanwhile, Cady is cruelling fattening up Regina. It's all about who is allowed to sit with whom in the canteen. Soon the day comes when it’s Regina – horror of horrors – who’s being turned away. That’s when all hell is let loose. It’s then down to maths teacher (and also the film’s screenwriter) Tina Fey to drag the mean queens back just the right side of humanity – and it’s a lovely scene in which she extols kindness without ever appearing too preachy. It’s the heart of the film and it’s the turning point. And the whole thing ends with all the right emotions, all decency restored – just as you knew it was always going to.

It's doubtful whether what happens next will be anywhere near as entertaining as what has gone before, but it sends us home happy at the end of a film which has made an artform of catty spitefulness and has dressed it all up amid a barrage of songs most of which are terrific. The film looks great at every moment; there are some fabulous (if nasty) lines; and there is genuine wit throughout, amid a wealth of fine performances. If the film had started up again straight away, I would have been happy. But maybe it’s better to go back to Mean Girls v1. Was it really as good as this?