Fire the promoters, because the worst part of Mean Girls is over before you enter the theater.
At first glance, Mean Girls’ posters imply a cookie-cutter pre-teen flick filled with long-legged, short-skirted hot girls. These advertisements make no mention of its screenwriter Tina Fey, whose entertaining and surprisingly smart script saves Mean Girls from the pink-lipsticked graveyard of forgettable teen flicks.
Lindsay Lohan stars as Cady Heron, who plunges into the high school scene after spending her childhood in the African wilderness with her zoologist parents. Upon her arrival at school, Cady meets an elite group of popular girls called the Plastics, a team of ditzy girls who wear pink on Wednesdays and only sport ponytails once a week. Their loyalty is challenged, however, when Cady falls for the ex-boyfriend of their leader.
At face value, this is a familiar setup and a tired plot. But Fey, in her screenwriting debut, showcases her “Saturday Night Live”-tested creative chops and brings this potentially lame movie to an unexpected level of hilarity.
Fey wisely opts against employing Cady’s newness to society as a source of laughs. Instead of giving Cady an Elf-like fascination with elevators and revolving doors, Fey stresses Cady’s newness through a series of fantasy jungle sequences seamlessly woven into the film that compare teenagers to untamed beasts.
In addition to Fey’s unique spin on an old story, cursing is kept to a notable minimum; the film instead relies on far more intelligent humor. Fey never talks down to her teen audience and continuously rewards viewers with belly-laughs and plot surprises.
Fey’s script, loosely based on Rosalind Wiseman’s parenting book Queen Bees and Wannabes, retains just enough points of the book’s wisdom to give the movie a message, rather than turning it into a sermon.
“Calling someone fat will not make you any thinner,” a plainspoken teacher played by Fey tells the assembly of girls. “And you’ve got to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it all right for guys to call you that.”
A talented cast acts out the script beautifully, and aside from the bland leading man (Jonathan Bennett) at the heart of the catfights, Mean Girls is a movie of vivid, perfectly cast characters.
Lohan (Freaky Friday, The Parent Trap) makes an appealing centerpiece, but the supporting cast steals the show.
Rachel McAdams, the unfortunate star of The Hot Chick, leads the strangely likable Plastics with a coy smile and a menacing glare, and “SNL” cast member Amy Poehler stands out in a recurring bit part as her promiscuous mom. McAdams’ hilariously unaware sidekicks are Gretchen Weiners (Lacey Chabert), whose father invented Toaster Strudel, and Karen Smith (Amanda Seyfried), who believes her breasts can predict rain.
“SNL” alum Tim Meadows plays the inept principal who scolds his students, “I would cancel the prom, but we already paid the DJ.”
Promising newcomer Daniel Franzese steals scenes as Lohan’s “almost too gay to function” companion, possibly the funniest gay character since Nathan Lane in The Birdcage.
The standout performances by Meadows and Franzese alone would be fully worth the viewing, and they keep the movie rolling as it sputters a bit toward the end. But a script brimming with quirky characters and Fey’s trademark humor makes Mean Girls a teen flick worth more than just a passing glance.