Details
- Title
- Mean Girls
- Director
- Mark S. Waters
- Cast
- Lindsey Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Tina Fey, Tim Meadows, Amy Poehler, Ana Gasteyer
- Length
- 97 min.
- Released
- 2004
Review
Yes, the premise is virtually identical to that of Heathers (minus the killing and the '80s) but what Mean Girls most reminded me of was my own days as a popular high-school girl.
Mean Girls borrowed the director (Mark Waters (relation to John?)) and star (Lindsay Lohan) from the recent remake of Freaky Friday, and seems like a cross between that movie and the television show Strangers With Candy. The end result is a film that is enjoyable to either demographic, though fans of the latter might find themselves wishing Mean Girls had more bite.
The real star, besides Lindsay Lohan, is writer Tina Fey, who decisively sheds the stigma of Jimmy Fallon. Many of the jokes are really quite good, and everything wraps up satisfyingly in the incongruously happy end. However, she does seem to have trouble with good idiot jokes. I could swear that ESPN joke was in one of the Scary Movies.
Mean Girls has a bizarrely positive ending, which may well be part of the joke. For most of the film it displays deliberately ambiguous morals. Even the unrealistically upbeat ending can barely conceal the dog-eat-dog lust-for-power machinations of high school politics. But it seems to be unrealistically positive as a continuation of the satire.
In any event, these are minor problems. And Mean Girls is appreciably more attractive than Strangers with Candy.
- Rating
- 5/8
- Reviewer
- Pat Jackson
- Published