Riley Richmond

I heard a lot of people were hating on this movie, so I would like to give my two cents. ACTING: I think that the acting was perfectly fine because the movie is supposed to be a crazy, unrealistic portrayal of classic high school. They do play a lot into tropes (dumb, hot girl, unpopular gays, jaw-dropping hot guys, ect.) but it does NOT take away from the viewing experience. In fact, I think that this is the first time in a long time where I have laughed multiple times in a movie theater. The jokes were perfectly timed and delivered well. And, Avantika played Karen so well, she had the perfect spaced out face and she made "Sexy" live up to my expectations. SINGING: I do admit that Cady's singing was very flat, emotionless, and not interesting, (she should've been casted differently) but AULI'I CRAVALHO and RENEE RAPP definitely saved the entire movie. You can tell that they carried the entire soundtrack, (Cravalho in 4 songs, plus another not in the soundtrack, and Rapp in another 3, making up for 7 of 12 songs being led by either one of them). WOKENESS: I think a lot of pushback this movie is receiving is because of the musical factor (breaking out into song randomly is the entire point of musicals) and the changing of how people interact. PLEASE keep in mind that the original Mean Girls came out in 2004 (20 years ago), and Iphones were introduced in 2007, and social media wasn't very popular until recently. I personally really like the way that the new Mean Girls integrated new teen culture, because if the characters interacted like they did in 2004, it would feel disconnected from today's culture. I really enjoyed how they included tiktok, with all the major things being trends on social media. Also, the way they were able to get the "Maybe world peace should be first/world peace then Halloween/wait, let me start over" was amazing. GAYS: Branching off the wokeness area, I noticed that a lot of characters in the movie were queer or something associated with LGBTQ. I think that this allowed for a very nice representation of current high schools. It doesn't necessarily take away from the movie, which is one of my movie watching mantras: it's not bad if it doesn't make the movie worse. Overall, I totally recommend this movie, 10/10, 5 stars