Mean Girls (2024)

The 2024 Mean Girls is the third film in a franchise that has already traveled from a parenting book to a teen comedy to a Broadway musical and back to the screen, a cycle of reincarnation suggesting the property refuses to stay dead. Tina Fey returns to write, and the Plastics have been recast with a color-conscious eye: a Pacific Islander Janis, a Black Damian, a South Asian Karen. This is representation by way of the ensemble sheet, and the film wears it lightly, letting the actors simply exist inside roles that were once narrower. Race enters the frame and then leaves without a word. That is the whole of the film's engagement with it.

Where the film does speak, quietly, is in the matter of who these kids are. Janis is a lesbian and Damian is gay, stated as fact and never as a thesis. The queerness sits in the story the way a locker sits in a hallway. The larger argument concerns girls, friendship, and the machinery that turns them against one another, and it lands with the soft thud of a moral rather than the crack of a manifesto. The gymnasium apology circle and the breaking of the plastic crown deliver their lesson about kindness and self-worth, and then the credits roll before anyone can be scolded further.

What the film declines to do is instructive. It casts no eye toward the climate, toward the wealthy, toward the body, toward the mind's varied wiring. No one lectures about carbon or capital. The satire of the "Sexy" number is aimed at teenage self-objectification, not at a culture of thinness, and it stays a joke. This is a musical comedy with a mild conscience, content to let its progressive touches ride along in the casting and the casting alone. It preaches only a little, and about the safest possible subject. The result is a reboot that knows exactly how much sermon its audience will tolerate, and administers a measured dose, no more, no less, then breaks the crown and sends everyone home.

Thematic tags: remake, book_adaptation, box_office_number_one.