“Rarely does good come from a wealthy auteur micromanaging their twenty-something-year-old property.”

When film essayist Lindsay Ellis made this observation, she was referring to some of the questionable decisions made by Andrew Lloyd Webber over the legacy of Phantom of the Opera, from its godawful film adaptation by Joel Schumacher to the ill-conceived stage sequel, Love Never Dies. But sitting through the 2024 reboot of Mean Girls (the musical, the movie, the snake eating its own tail), I saw Tina Fey join the circle of creators that can’t leave their creation well enough alone.

The original 2004 film, following sweet, naive Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) being swept up in the ‘Girl World’ high-school food chain and the Machievellian charm of Queen Bee Regina George (Rachel McAdams) and her crew of Plastics, was based on Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes, a 2002 guide for parents of teen girls about navigating the trials and tribulations of high school cliquery. It’s iconic for good reason, its lightning-in-a-bottle comic timing and endlessly quotable dialogue the result of Fey combining her own high-school experience with (at the time) finger-on-the-pulse research. The stage musical was the result of Fey wanting that sweet sweet licensing money from high schools across the world, and while it has its moments, you can feel the sharpness dulling. There are some memorable songs on this score, but there are also one too many lyrics that smack of men in their forties trying to imagine how teen girls talk. As an adaptation of the musical, Mean Girls c.2024 is already not great. As an adaptation of its 2004 ancestor, it’s so far removed from the potency of its source material it’s practically homeopathic.

Let’s begin with our protagonist. Where Lohan’s Cady perfectly captured the transition from wide-eyed naïf to Queen Bee clone, Angourie Rice plays it with a dour, glassy-eyed disinterest that made me wonder which of the producer’s daughters she must have been to land this gig. She is absolutely outclassed by anyone she shares the screen with, from husky-voiced femme fatale Renée Rapp as Regina to Auli’i Cravalho and Jaquel Spivey as Janis and Damian, scheming queer besties and Greek chorus (when the film remembers, at least). And the film seems to know this, removing her internal monologue and giving some of her most character-establishing songs from the stage show to the chorus or just cutting them entirely. Her entire final altercation with Regina is played out in the background while Cravalho is singing at full belt; it’s like the film is having to work around Cady rather than letting her be an active agent. Pair her with Christopher Briney as love interest Aaron Samuels, who has all the dashing charm of a potential school shooter (you tell me his walk down the corridor to find girlfriend Regina canoodling with Shane Oman doesn’t feel like the start of a drama about Columbine), and you might well have 2024’s least compelling onscreen couple.

And even those committed performances have to have the qualifier of “with the material they’re given” attached - Rapp has incredible stage and screen presence but her Regina’s meanness is often artlessly blunt and charmless; less passive-aggressive and more, well, aggressive-aggressive. Cravalho and Spivey make a charismatic and entertaining duo, especially in their high-energy ‘Revenge Party’ number, but Janis in particular has had so much of her complexity come out in the wash. Lizzy Kaplan’s Janis Ian might have some righteous moments in the original, but she’s meant to be Regina’s dark mirror, as manipulative and scheming as the Plastics, just with more piercings and kohl liner. Cravalho’s Janis is missing that hard-edged abrasiveness; her Urban Outfitter-ised costume design makes her presence feel so much less distinct in a sea of fashion-forward Gen Zers and her sanitised storyline glosses over the very real ways being ‘not like the other girls’ can also be weaponised. The point of Mean Girls is that - shock, horror - girls are mean; everyone has been a victim, everyone has been a perpetrator, and everyone has the capacity to do better. You soften Janis’ edges, you lose that message.

As a comedy, the rhythm is all wrong. The 2004 script has some outdated jokes to be sure, but at its best it’s like Mel Brooks for teen girls - rapid-fire gags that hit big and move on, keeping the momentum going. The remake lifts whole chunks of dialogue from the old script verbatim, and is so self-conscious of its iconic lines that it drags them out like a lingering fart, looking you dead in the eye as if to say, “Get it? We said The Thing!”. It utterly disrupts the flow and gives the whole thing a weird, uncomfortable intensity, not helped by the fact that some of the funniest songs in the Broadway score are given a maudlin, bedroom-pop gloss that robs them of their energy (the pun ‘calcu-lust’ should never be delivered so sadly), or cut entirely (where was ‘Stop’, Tina, you coward?). Combine this with the film’s flip-flopping indecisiveness over whether to be meta or not, and it all falls fantastically flat.

The memorable moments come when the film fully embraces its own silly. There are original gags here that REALLY work. Mathlete Kevin G’s business card that says ‘Public Figure’? Funny! Damien singing the theme to ‘iCarly’ in French for the talent show? Funny! Airhead Karen Shetty (a standout performance from Avantika) telling Regina her pimple looks like a ‘sexy face breast’? Hilarious! The absurd speed at which social media hastens Regina’s downfall is also pretty well-observed - if the film trusted instincts like that we might actually be looking at something fresh, but sadly it doesn’t have the courage of its convictions.

What gave 2004 Mean Girls its punch was that it had such a solid sense of what it was and what it had to say. Everything from dialogue to soundtrack to costume design so clearly and effectively communicated everything you needed to know about these characters. 2024 Mean Girls, much like Cady, has sacrificed any originality on the altar of the popular, leaving it without an identity of its own. And that’s just so not fetch.