Mean Girls (in theaters) 

Should we modernize campy cult classics?

In most cases, the answer is an unqualified no. In the case of the 20-year-old “Mean Girls,” which just hit theaters in the form of a modernized musical, the answer is more complicated. Yes, the musical is a lot closer to modern teen experience. It makes the social messages more timely, and may help current teens feel seen and understood far more than the now decidedly retro original.

But the camp is gone. The deliciously absurdist edge of the original is almost eradicated, visible only in flickering moments and a handful of performances. This is a musical, one of the potentially campiest genres out there, and yet the lead villain sounds like Sexy Taylor Swift (tm). Only the songs sung by Avantika as Karen have anywhere near the show stopping verve they’re supposed to. I’m watching “Mean Girls,” a movie that’s supposed to carry the spirit of an undisputed cult classic, and I’m kind of bored.

Still, there are a few people with the right energy. Avantika gives her all to her character’s sweet ditz energy, and Busy Phillips is perfect as Regina’s mom. Auli’i Cravalho offers a great twist on Janice, while Jaquel Spivey is an absolute delight as Damien. Renée Rapp was great as drugged Regina, and Angourie Rice had some sweet moments as Cady.

Watching them blends the best of old and new “Mean Girls,” giving you a real sense of what the movie was trying to do. 

Grade: Two and a half stars

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (in theaters) 

I’m all for keeping movies shorter, but not when they sacrifice the quality of the movies themselves. 

“Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” comes in at just over two hours, which is a relatively brisk time in today’s movie climate. Unfortunately, the entire first hour is told almost like a recap rather than the actual movie, with an immense amount of voiceover narration and potentially interesting scenes cut down to a series of excerpts. Though the second hour settles into dumb fun, particularly in the interplay between Jason Momoa and Patrick Wilson, the first hour feels more like hearing the story told to you by a particularly uninteresting man at a party. 

There’s also even more CGI in this one than there was in the original, and the quality hasn’t improved in the slightest. Avoid 3D screenings whenever you can and be grateful for the moments when the characters get to be surrounded by reality. 

Still, there are things to like in the second half of the movie. The best of them is the unexpected comedy duo that is Momoa and Wilson, whose hatred from the first movie has mellowed into an exasperation that feels particularly sibling-like. Their characters have very different ways of doing pretty much everything, which means that making them work together leads to the most interesting sequences in the whole movie. 

In my dreams, Warner Brothers would drop them both in a streaming series where they have to do things like go to the grocery store and babysit Aquaman’s son. I would watch six seasons of it. 

Grade: One and a half stars

Jenniffer Wardell is an award-winning movie critic and member of the Utah Film Critics Association. Find her on Twitter at @wardellwriter or drop her a line at [email protected].