Fetch lives: "Mean Girls"

In the great 21st century IP merry-go-round, Mean Girls has so far been a reliably entertaining 2004 comedy, written by Tina Fey, and an apparently successful stage musical with songs by Fey and her composer husband Jeff Richmond. Now it generates a film of the stage musical, as we got with Roald Dahl's Matilda, and as we're about to get with The Color Purple, opening next week. (And no, I can't believe anybody thought to turn The Color Purple into a musical either, but they did and so here we all are.) If the new Mean Girls has prompted anything in the way of pre-release buzz, it's been online chatter about a trailer that went out of its way to disguise the fact this version is a musical reworking rather than a straightahead reboot. As one after another of Fey and Richmond's not unpleasant but almost wholly forgettable B-/C+ tunes passes in one ear and out the other, you understand why the Paramount marketing nabobs took this decision: these songs are not in themselves going to inspire anyone to see Mean Girls again, or rather they matter greatly less than having Mean Girls as a title. The new film's musical aspect is only really interesting for what it reveals about the perilous place of comedy within today's studio system. Every now and again, the songs give rise to a witty, audibly Fey-authored line - I liked "watch me run the world in shoes I cannot walk in" - but they're not comedy in the way "Springtime for Hitler" or "Big Bottom" or "Blame Canada" are comedy; mostly, they serve to underline what we already know about these characters from the original script, or add unnecessary notes of explanation. They're afterthoughts set to music. Worse still, in terms of how the overall film functions, they delay the arrival of the next properly funny scene or joke. At a time when the cinemagoing public is crying out for light relief - to the extent of embracing even the by all accounts entirely mid Anyone but You - here is a studio proposition that insists a funny Mean Girls no longer suffices; that Fey and her cast and crew must now sing and dance for their supper.

This, they duly and undeniably do. Only time will tell whether the new Mean Girls will enjoy the careers of their illustrious predecessors, but they hit their marks, give of their best, and hope this will be enough. (It's not their fault we're all sat there running permanent mental comparisons.) Angourie Rice is typically bright as Cady, and she works up a sweet normie rapport with Christopher Briney (who has the easiest gig here, on the grounds nobody remembers the boys in the first film); it's just she's understudying in a role that confirmed Lindsay Lohan as a solid-gold star. The vaguely somnolent Reneé Rapp makes this Regina George a drowsy queen bee, which is certainly a different approach to that the poised and perky Rachel McAdams took. As one of her underlings, Avantika has a spacey young Carol Kane/Kimmy Robertson vibe; and Moana's Auli'i Cravalho, as indie chick Janis, brought back pleasant memories of watching Vanessa Hudgens in 2009's underrated Bandslam. Again: they're only evoking other performances in other movies, but this might be preferable to the fate of the grown-ups present, who find themselves with nothing to do now the kids are Gleeing it up every five minutes. Busy Philipps, with her marvellously busy features, does a neat sketch of a mum who still believes she's as young as her daughter ("I'm @coooooolmom, with six Os"), but then disappears. Fey favourite Jon Hamm has a scene-and-a-bit as a gruff sex-ed coach, and then disappears. There are recalls for both Fey and Tim Meadows, who now seem like weary babysitters of both their students and the whole Mean Girls project, but as they're not here to sing and dance, they too start to appear surplus to requirements. The sociology that was a trace element of the original source material (Rosalind Wiseman's non-fiction handbook Queen Bees and Wannabes) has largely gone, replaced by tits and teeth; and Fey's generally confounding internal politics - her complicated relationship with feminisms old and new - becomes no less legible for having theatre kids bellow high notes over the top of them. At all turns, the human element looks to have become secondary to a prevailing Cowellisation of culture: the need to convert everything, even faux-edgy studio comedies, into conduits for MOR pop music that won't offend anyone but might persuade folks to pay $50 a pop in the theatre and fork over another $10 in the cinema. As history dutifully repeats and rhymes with itself, what we're really being invited to cheer here is a revenue stream sustained for the best part of two decades. Fey has done very well out of it all told, but this Mean Girls is like 30 Rock converted into Kimmy Schmidt: a longer sit, far more diffuse and dilute in its pleasures, and neither as funny nor as entertaining as its predecessor. It needed more Girls5eva.

Mean Girls is now playing in cinemas nationwide.