Mean Girls and Hardy boys: The not-so changing face of the teen movie

Whether it’s a musical reboot of a hit Noughties comedy like ‘Mean Girls’, or a cinematic re-release of an old favourite like ‘10 Things I Hate About You’, there’s something about the teen movie that seems unable to escape the past. From ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ to ‘Eighth Grade’, Geoffrey Macnab looks at the genre that refuses to grow old

‘10 Things I Hate About You, ‘Rebel Without a Cause’, ‘Mean Girls’ and ‘The Breakfast Club’ are among the teen flicks to have won over viewers (Alamy/Getty)

When the musical reboot of Mean Girls chasséd onto cinema screens in early January, certain critics were underwhelmed. This was a teen movie based on another teen movie from 20 years before – that was itself inspired by the hundreds of other teen movies that preceded it. “Unsatisfying”; “culturally irrelevant”; “frantically self-regarding”: these were among the many harsh remarks that greeted the brash film’s arrival.

But then again, reviewers have long struggled to take teen movies seriously. They are among cinema’s most durable and commercially successful genres – and yet everyone still scoffs at them. Often, they’re dismissed for being either too frothy or too earnest. The New York Times complained about the “deadly self-importance” of John Hughes’s 1985 classic teen ensemble piece The Breakfast Club, but then, a few years later, grumbled about the blandness of coming-of-age comedy The Princess Diaries, as if the film weren’t self-important enough.

The complaint was nothing new: the same paper had in fact been grousing about the formulaic side of teen movies since 1940, when the Mickey Rooney teen film Andy Hardy Meets Debutante saw the genre come of age. “We can’t help speculating upon how much they all look alike,” the NYT wrote. But the reviewer had inadvertently stumbled on one of the eternal truths about teen movies. No matter how much filmmakers strive to modernise the format, they always seem to end up in the same place as before.