If you’re suffering from a pink-coloured gap in your life after last year’s Barbie-mania, you don’t have long to wait for a top-up. Mean Girls, a musical remake of the cult 2004 teen comedy with Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams, is hitting cinemas across the globe and trying to make ‘fetch’ happen all over again.
Newbies Angourie Rice, Reneé Rapp, Avantika Vandanapu and Bebe Wood are taking the reins as Cady, Regina, Karen and Gretchen, with Emily in Paris star Ashley Parks and ex-Mad Man Jon Hamm joining the cast. Tina Fey and Tim Meadows are back as maths teacher Ms Norbury and Principal Duvall respectively.
Here are five major takeaways from the latest retelling of the Plastics and their prey.
1. Yes, it’s definitely a musical – and the songs get a B+
This Mean Girls follows the original storyline – a transfer student decides climbing the social ladder is more important than maintaining her GPA – but it’s adapted from the Broadway musical, so expect the characters to break into song in closets and cafeterias this time. Following? It takes a while to get used to Cady singing about calculus and some numbers are too dull to function (‘It Roars’, ‘What’s Wrong with Me’) but when it works, it works. Our pick? ‘Apex Predator’, a catchy cautionary tale about Regina’s status as queen of the high-school jungle.
2. It’s still trying to make ‘fetch’ happen
Happily for Plastics purists, all the iconic one-liners are back. ‘You can’t sit with us’, ‘On Wednesdays we wear pink’, ‘Get in loser’, ‘Stop trying to make “fetch” happen’ ... they’re all reprised in Tina Fey’s script. But if you were hoping for Busy Philipps, who takes over from Amy Poehler as Mrs George, to tell us she’s a ‘cool mom’, you’ll be disappointed. Instead, she reveals herself to be somewhere between three and 30 years behind the cultural curve when she tells the teens to ‘slay like no one’s watching’ and that ‘real beauty comes from the face’.
3. It’ll make older Millennials grind their teeth
While the 2004 movie came out in the Paris Hilton-and-lowrise-jeans-era, this time around it’s all about vapes and veganism. The high schoolers are now drinking Oatly, using gender neutral toilets and referencing, ahem, ‘old’ movies and shows like ‘Juno’ and ‘iCarly’. The film’s tagline – ‘This isn’t your mother’s Mean Girls’ – was a warning that Tina Fey’s screenplay was coming for thirtysomething Mean Girl fans and so it proves.
4. There’s a major Easter egg for OG fans
You don’t have to have watched the original to enjoy this one but it definitely helps, because this new Mean Girls gets into the origin stories and reworks familiar scenes from new angles. We see Cady living in Africa and there’s a fun new perspective on the ‘raise your hand if you've been personally victimised by Regina George’ scene. There’s also a major callback to look out for that will make a lot of us feel 13 again – or it may wash over the heads of today’s embryos the same way most Friends cameos did for us oldies in the ’90s. Seriously, Chandler dating Julia Roberts was wasted on us.
5. Avantika Vandanapu could be the new Amanda Seyfried
Just as the original movie put the likes of Amanda Seyfried on the map, Mean Girls 2.0 is likely to make a household name out of Avantika Vandanapu, who plays Karen. Her solo of ‘Sexy’ is her standout moment, showing off her comedy chops as she gives a musical TED talk on the power of sexiness via a social media livestream. Don’t be surprised to see her as a Marvel villain, Brontë sister or Greta Gerwig’s latest muse soon...
Read our review of Mean Girls here.