The new Mean Girls is a musical, though it’s not titled Mean Girls: The Musical. (Call it that only if you want a swift reprimand from Paramount.) Look at the film’s marketing, and the only hint you’ll get of this is the eighth note coyly hiding within the “A” in “Mean.”

As soon as Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr.’s updated take on Tina Fey’s canonical comedy begins, though, we’re hit by a musical prologue stylized as a TikTok that segues into a full-blown production number on a Kenyan savannah. That’s where we meet our new Cady Heron (Mare of Easttown’s Angourie Rice), the bright-eyed innocent who will gradually be corrupted by the vicious North Shore High Plastics: Gretchen (Bebe Wood), Karen (Avantika), and, of course, the notorious Regina George (Reneé Rapp).

You know the story: that Cady, prodded by arty outsiders Damian (Jaquel Spivey) and Janis (Auli’i Cravalho), will infiltrate the Plastics in an attempt to take them down a few pegs. That in the process, she’ll inadvertently become one of them, before a slightly tacked-on third-act reversal that restores peace and order to Girl World. Along the way, there will be Kälteen bars and four candy canes for Glen Coco, pink on Wednesdays and aggressively confident Mathletes, a heavy flow and a wide-set vagina.

Mean Girls 2.0 imports many of the original’s gags and setpieces wholesale; its “you can’t sit with us” scene is basically a word-for-word recreation, and Rapp’s Regina sports the same braid and off-the-shoulder black top that Rachel McAdams’s did when she unleashes the Plastics’ Burn Book for the entire school to see. These moments are uncanny at best and cringey at worst, particularly for those who have the 2004 version memorized (a not-insignificant portion of this film’s intended audience).

But happily, they don’t make up the majority of the movie—which is technically based on the 2018 Broadway version of Mean Girls (also written by Fey) rather than the first film, anyway. Fey, who joins her old pal Tim Meadows by reprising her role as a teacher, has updated her script in numerous ways, nixing dated references as well as subplots that would no longer fly (Coach Carr, now played by Jon Hamm, no longer has to be asked to step away from the underage girls). Instead of Girls Gone Wild and Unfriendly Black Hotties, we get fresh jokes that occasionally sing more than the 2004 versions did; in all cases, the best new punchlines generate bigger laughs than the old ones.

The songs, by Fey’s composer husband, Jeff Richmond and lyricist Nell Benjamin, are less consistently successful, largely because Benjamin’s declarative phrases and wordy rhymes can’t quite match Fey’s wit. But they’re less baggy here than they were on Broadway, and performed with gusto by an incredibly talented cast of triple threats, particularly Cravalho—her showstopping 11 o’clock number, “I’d Rather Be Me,” is like a profane update on her inspirational Moana anthem, “How Far I’ll Go”—and Avantika, whose gloriously dim Karen recalls Amanda Seyfried’s spacey performance without copying it line by line. (Rice’s pipes aren’t quite as strong, but she’s appealing in the part famously originated by Lindsay Lohan.) They’re also filmed impressively and inventively by Jayne and Perez, who lean into tracking shots that evoke the energy of a live performance.

Rapp travels even farther from the source material as a Queen Bee who’s more sultry than steely, a breathy pop diva with perfectly manicured claws. As Regina, her enunciation is less crisp than it was when she played this same role in the Broadway show, which is a shame—but she’s got undeniable charisma, making clear why Regina literally looms so much larger than everyone else on the movie’s poster.

That was always the funny thing about Mean Girls, a film that didn’t really seem to believe that the world would be better if everyone were nicer to each other. (At the very least, Mean Girls implied, it’d be way less funny.) As a rule, pop culture is more sincere now than it was in 2004; the musical, too, is an inherently earnest medium, regardless of what Broadway’s flood of snide meta-shows would have you think. So the “just be yourself” ending rings a little less false in the 2024 Mean Girls, even if the best jokes are still the most pointed ones. Who says you can’t have your Kälteen bar and eat it, too?