Angourie Rice | Bouquets & Brickbats

20/01/24

Cineworld, Edinburgh

It’s 10.30 on Saturday morning, and we’re already at the cinema, settled in for the day’s first screening. Because who’s got the patience to wait for a musical reboot of Mean Girls? Certainly not us.

We re-watched the 2004 original last night and were surprised at how fresh it felt. Sure, there were a few (quite a few) wince-inducing ‘of-its-time’ moments, but overall it was still funny, smart and subtly subversive.

As you’d expect, this 2024 version – based on the 2017 Broadway musical adaptation and directed by Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr – has been cleverly updated. Not only do we have social media, we also have a more diverse cast. Cady has been living in a country (Kenya) rather than a continent (Africa), and Janis is actually allowed to be gay.

For anyone who’s been living under a (30) rock, Tina Fey’s sassy script is a high school comedy/coming-of-age tale. Teenager Cady (Angourie Rice) has just arrived in the USA from Kenya, where her zoologist mum (Jenna Fischer) has been conducting some research. Previously home-educated, Cady is desperate to go to school, to mix with other kids and find out what she’s been missing. But the transition isn’t easy. High school is a jungle too, and Cady doesn’t know the rules of this new territory…

Initially befriended by happy misfits Janis (Auli’i Cravalho) and Damian (Jaquel Spivey), Cady soon comes to the attention of The Plastics – a trio of vacuous ‘popular’ girls at the top of the social pecking order. Much to everyone’s surprise, queen bee Regina George (Reneé Rapp) invites the gauche newcomer to hang out with them. It’s flattering to be asked so, when Janis suggests seizing the opportunity to infiltrate the group and feed back any intel, Cady doesn’t take much persuading. She soon finds that she actually likes Regina’s acolytes, Gretchen (Bebe Wood) and Karen (Avantika) – and that she wants to please Regina too.

When Cady falls for her calculus classmate, Aaron (Christopher Briney), Regina reveals her mean streak by seducing him, and Cady’s own dark side comes into force. She, Janis and Damian wage war on Regina, determined to topple her – and make Aaron dump her. But Cady enjoys wielding her new-found power just a little too much, and before she knows it she’s sacrificing her real friends. Has she actually become a Plastic?

Mean Girls 2024 has all the verve and wit of the original and the musical numbers (by Jeff Richmond) really work, dialling up the histrionics and highlighting the humour. Rice is delightful in the lead role, and it’s great to see the original Cady, Lindsay Lohan, in a cameo. Tina Fey and Tim Meadows reprise their roles of Ms Norbury and Mr Duvall, and this works extremely well. Indeed, Fey looks almost exactly the same in both movies (I guess there’s an ageing picture in an attic somewhere). The supporting roles are more fleshed out here too, and I like learning more about both Karen and Gretchen.

I’m a little sad that the fat-shaming hasn’t been eradicated, that the nastiest trick Cady and her friends can play is to make a girl gain weight. Worse, the extra pounds Regina’s carrying actually have a greater impact in this incarnation, as the Plastics’ dance routine is ruined because she’s too heavy to lift. This feels like a blind-spot in an otherwise fabulous film.

It’s not enough to spoil things though. The new Mean Girls delivers just what it’s supposed to: a couple of hours of lively, well-crafted and eminently quotable fun. “Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen!”

4.3 stars

Susan Singfield

2629

12/06/16

Shane Black is an interesting fellow. A former screenwriter who’s status went meteoric after the runaway success of the Lethal Weapon franchise, his career went into the doldrums after later multi-million dollar scripts failed to put bums on seats in enough numbers to earn back the huge advances. But in 2005, his first film as director, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang earned his some much-needed brownie points (at least from the critics, even if it didn’t pull in huge crowds) and his subsequent helming of Iron Man 3 made him, once again, a bankable name, a big hitter.

So, he has the chance to start over and here’s The Nice Guys, which has all the classic Shane Black tropes: essentially a buddie movie, it features two mismatched characters bumbling their way through a complicated plot, milking some genuine big laughs along the way and pausing every so often for a insanely high-powered, ultra violent action sequence. Throw in the evocative 70s setting and this is everything that Inherent Vice could have been if it had bothered to incorporate a decent plot.

Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) is a former cop, now fallen on hard times and reduced to beating up people for a living, something he does to the very best of his ability. One such person is Holland Marsh (Ryan Gosling) possibly the world’s most inept Private Detective, but when it transpires that both men are involved in looking for the same missing person, a young runaway who has recently been linked to the tragic death of infamous porn star, Misty Mountains, it seems expedient to join forces and pool their ‘expertise.’ Sadly, this is something that’s in rather short supply, but luckily Marsh’s precocious teenage daughter Holly (an appealing performance by Angourie Rice) has enough chutzpah to help them through. As the plot unfolds it transpires that there’s a conspiracy at the heart of the story that goes all the way to the top of the slippery pole.

Crowe and Gosling make an appealing double act. Gosling is particularly good, wringing every last drop out of his assured comic performance, (this is a man who can’t break a window without severing a major vein) while Crowe is, for once, actually rather likeable as a bluff, hard-hitting guy with anger management issues. While you could argue that the film is essentially a big piece of fluff, what fabulously accomplished fluff it is! It breezes effortlessly through its 116 minutes running time and actually leaves you wanting more. A coda suggests that there could be a second adventure for these two and on the form of this one, I’d say that’s a decent suggestion.

You’ll come out relishing some of Marsh’s more idiotic lines. A particular favourite? ‘Yeah, well you know who else was ‘just following orders?’ Hitler!’

Priceless.

4.4 stars

Philip Caveney