★★★

Two decades of narrative reclamation haven’t been kind to Mean Girls. That’s not to withdraw the film’s status as the noughties’ seminal behemoth. The film remains the most instantly quotable of the twenty-first century to date. It’s fetch. And yet, as astute as Mean Girls was in its acerbic assessment of clique culture, the aging process has exposed through lines of misogyny, racism and homophobia. To this end, the 2024 do-over can’t help but feel like contemporary sanitisation. The product of a late night spent pouring over think piece assassinations. It’s fun. It’s well cast. It still doesn’t make fetch happen.