Mean Girls (12A, 112 mins)
Mean Girls is set in a caricature of a small-town U.S. high school.
Two whole decades have now passed since the original Mean Girls came out; plenty of those girls in their early teens who dragged their mothers to see it are now parents themselves, with better things to do than gather their old pals and head to the pictures on a cold January night, perhaps after a few gussied-up cocktails. But they should.
This version, not a straight remake, but an exuberant musical, based on the 2018 Broadway show, is a blast. I confess I sloped into the Cineworld Leicester Square with a slightly heavy heart, expecting to endure rather than enjoy, yet I loved it. It’s tremendous fun.
The original film boasted quite a cast: Tina Fey (who also wrote the screenplay), Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Amy Poehler, and Amanda Seyfried in her feature-film debut.
The leads this time are a little less illustrious, though who knows what lies ahead? Australian actress Angourie Rice is perfectly cast as Cady Heron, who, having been home-schooled in Kenya by her earnest zoologist mother (Jenna Fischer), is plunged into the bitch-eat-bitch world of North Shore High, where busty, glossy-lipped Regina George (the excellent Reneé Rapp, who played the role on Broadway) rules the roost.
![Mean Girls Review: Brian Viner Praises Tina Fey's All-Singing Modern-Day Remake with Top Marks 1 This version, not a straight remake, but an exuberant musical, based on the 2018 Broadway show, is a blast](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/01/18/21/80198513-12980651-image-a-1_1705612598842.jpg)
This version, not a straight remake, but an exuberant musical, based on the 2018 Broadway show, is a blast
![Mean Girls Review: Brian Viner Praises Tina Fey's All-Singing Modern-Day Remake with Top Marks 3 The leads this time are a little less illustrious, though who knows what lies ahead?](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/01/18/21/80198487-12980651-image-a-2_1705612615927.jpg)
The leads this time are a little less illustrious, though who knows what lies ahead?
![Mean Girls Review: Brian Viner Praises Tina Fey's All-Singing Modern-Day Remake with Top Marks 5 Tina Fey reprises her role as maths teacher Ms. Norbury in the new Mean Girls](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/01/18/21/80198519-12980651-image-a-3_1705612664682.jpg)
Tina Fey reprises her role as maths teacher Ms. Norbury in the new Mean Girls
To mix metaphors even further, she’s the school’s imperious queen bee, queening it even over the teachers. To be in her gang is to share her status: ‘She’s the queen of beasts and I’m in her pride/ I have hitched a ride … with the apex predator.’
The ensuing narrative sees the nervous, impressionable Cady bullied by Regina and her acolytes, collectively known as ‘the Plastics’.
Yet, against all the odds, Cady gradually acquires the nous and nastiness to usurp the apex predator.
It’s delightfully done and significantly the writer is Fey again, also reprising her role as maths teacher Mrs Norbury, with Jon Hamm in a funny but fleeting role as the gym coach and one other cameo that it might be better not to disclose. There’s a laugh-out-loud performance too from Busy Philipps as Regina’s silly, synthetic mum, who solemnly tells her, after Cady has masterminded the sly campaign to make Regina put on weight, that ‘real beauty comes from … the face’.
It’s a perfectly timed, very funny subversion of the old ‘beauty from within’ platitude in a film that doesn’t hold too many surprises for fans of the original, nor in truth has been universally welcomed, but for me was full of January cheer.
Can Jodie keep her head (and her baby’s) above water?
The End We Start From (15, 102 mins)
Directed by Mahalia Belo, it is based on the novel by Megan Hunter and set in Britain in the near future.
It stars Jodie Comer as a young mother who goes into labour in her London home at precisely the same moment that the house begins to flood after incessant rain. Waters are breaking in more ways than one.
The rest of the film chronicles her efforts to keep herself and her baby son safe after flooding devastates the city, and in some ways reminded me of the more mainstream A Quiet Place (2018). There is no alien invasion here, though; the threat to humanity is climate change.
![Mean Girls Review: Brian Viner Praises Tina Fey's All-Singing Modern-Day Remake with Top Marks 7 It stars Jodie Comer as a young mother who goes into labour in her London home at precisely the same moment that the house begins to flood after incessant rain](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/01/18/21/80198749-12980651-image-a-4_1705612750315.jpg)
It stars Jodie Comer as a young mother who goes into labour in her London home at precisely the same moment that the house begins to flood after incessant rain
![Mean Girls Review: Brian Viner Praises Tina Fey's All-Singing Modern-Day Remake with Top Marks 9 The rest of the film chronicles her efforts to keep herself and her baby son safe after flooding devastates the city](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/01/18/21/80198751-12980651-image-m-6_1705612769690.jpg)
The rest of the film chronicles her efforts to keep herself and her baby son safe after flooding devastates the city
Comer’s unnamed character has a partner (Joel Fry) and there are small roles for the film’s co-producer Benedict Cumberbatch, as well as Gina McKee, Mark Strong and Katherine Waterston. But it’s Comer’s picture and she’s as wonderful as ever. It’s nice, moreover, to hear her talking in her actual Liverpudlian accent. She was a working-class Chicago girl the last time I saw her, in the superb forthcoming film The Bikeriders.
That said, she doesn’t have too many lines here. Alice Birch’s screenplay keeps the dialogue extremely spare, and frankly the film is 20 per cent too enigmatic for my liking, but it works as a tale of motherhood in all-too-believably challenging circumstances.
The Kitchen (15, 107 mins)
The Netflix film The Kitchen works too, as a story of a friendship between a man (Kane Robinson) and the teenage son (Jedaiah Bannerman) of his dead ex-girlfriend. They live in the eponymous Kitchen, a huge, seedy apartment block in a dystopian London with drones overhead and savage armed police on the ground.
Daniel Kaluuya is the debutant co-director with Kibwe Tavares but he doesn’t feature, more’s the pity. The former footballer and pundit Ian Wright does, though. He plays Lord Kitchener, not the moustachioed general but the Kitchen’s own radio announcer, who tells residents where to find running water. And he’s jolly good.