Like a generation-wide sip from an old knight’s fake-out grail, we’re collectively realizing that Mean Girls turned 20 this year. In response to this senseless continuation of the linear progression of time, a movie musical was produced, starring people who were just old enough to jam out to Wow! Wow! Wubbzy when the original came out.
Now, the reviews are in. A swath of rapidly decomposing Millennials have shared their thoughts on the results of Tina Fey’s movie based on a musical based on a movie. What’s their verdict? That’s one question. There’s a more important one, though: How many internet critics honestly believed that they were the only ones smart enough to think to describe Mean Girls in terms of whether or not it was “fetch?”
Mean Girls reviews: Tepid, with a side of fetch
All told, reviews for 2024’s Mean Girls have been almost universally middling, and have almost universally included the word “fetch.”
The San Francisco Chronicle, for example, gave Mean Girls three out of four stars, deriding aspects of the original that aged poorly, while calling its performers and their musical chops “totally fetch.” Silver Screen Riot addressed an issue that the old guard of Mean Girls fans were no doubt concerned about – that the original film was a classic, and that any attempt to capture that lightning-in-a-bottle for a second time might border on the profane. Against all odds, their assessment concludes that the remake’s “colorful cast of newbies actually make fetch happen.”
Not everyone was so forgiving. Some folks didn’t think that Mean Girls was fetch. Some folks didn’t think it was fetch at all. Mashable mourned what might have been, saying that there’s “no denying this Mean Girls is playing it safe. And that’s not fetch.” The Detroit Times described the series as feeling “like cosplay” of the original, accusing it of “trying to make fetch happen, and falling short of the mark.” Over at The AV Club, the musical was ripped for “recycling jokes enough times that it comes across as cynical” – a fair criticism in the creative arts – in a review titled “Fetch Just Can’t Happen Twice.”
Mean Girls is currently floating at around a 75% critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, putting it squarely between the 84% score attached to the original movie and Mean Girls 2, the made-for-TV sequel from 2011 that everyone forgot about, which was universally regarded as being not particularly fetch. Do you ever read a word so many times that you forget it means anything? It just sort of becomes a noise in your head after a while. Fetch. Fetch. I’m so tired.