Genre: comedy

Mean Girls

Directed by Mark S. Waters

Written by Tina Fey

Starring Lindsay Lohan,

Rachel McAdams and Tina Fey

Classification: PG

Rating: **½

Arriving in her junior year to an Illinois suburban high school, 16-year-old Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) knows nothing about the rules of contemporary high-school society. Home-schooled by her zoologist parents in Africa, she has missed the entire John Hughes canon, along with Clueless, Heathers, and a score of other teen morality tales. She is in no position to take on the Mean Girls.

The screenwriting debut of Saturday Night Live head writer Tina Fey, Mean Girls is derived from a popular parental guide (Rosalind Wiseman's Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and Other Realities of Adolescence), and brought to life by girl-friendly director Mark S. Waters (Freaky Friday, The House of Yes).

Cady gains her initial insights into the pecking order from a pair of bright outcasts, with Lizzy Caplan as the goth artiste and possible lesbian, coyly named Janis Ian (after the songwriter of At Seventeen), and the plump Damian (Daniel Franzese), who Janis describes as "too gay to function." Janis and Damien warn Cady of a trio of perfectly groomed social tyrants known as The Plastics. There's the neurotic princess, Gretchen (Lacey Chabert), the angelic but imbecilic Karen (Amanda Seyfried), and their leader, the "totally evil" Regina (Rachel McAdams), a blond monster who plays power and mind games to rival any cell-block honcho.

Cady soon gets a taste of her style. First, Regina tells Cady she's pretty and when Cady shyly thanks her, she earns a threatening follow-up: "So you think you're really pretty?"

Mean Girls is at its freshest when conveying the games played in what Cady calls "Girl World." We learn of the secret codes of cafeteria seating (and the lonely option of a washroom-cubicle lunch); the "social suicide" of the math team; and the way A-list girls indulge in a brisk trade in hot boys as social status symbols.

When Janis and Damien urge Cady to infiltrate the Plastic power centre and learn even more secrets, she reluctantly agrees. When she's offered Regina's former boyfriend, Aaron (Jonathan Bennett), only to have him snatched away again, the mission to topple the hierarchy becomes personal. In the process of pretending, Cady starts becoming plastic and mean herself before learning the error of her ways.

Lohan, in her third lead role in a year (Confessions of a Drama Queen, Freaky Friday), is a good reactive young actress, and London, Ont., native Rachel McAdams is excellently evil, a dose of poison in a pretty lacquered container.

Otherwise, producer Lorne Michaels pads the cast with SNL regulars: Tina Fey, as a twitchy good-hearted math teacher; Tim Meadows as the long-suffering principal; and Amy Poehler as Regina's youth-obsessed mother.

Also typical of SNL movie comedies is the slap-dash structure - really just a sequence of sketches laboriously herded toward a sentimental conclusion.

For all its sharp moments, the script is also peppered with unworthy caricatures: the Indian student who comes on like a gangsta rapper; the gay student who does little but snap off bitchy lines like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy's Carson Kressley.

What will real girls, mean or otherwise, think of the movie? A young woman I know, who uses her dark powers mostly for good, offers an interesting take on what those "mean girls" really are. For her, the movie's subtext is about the young star's physical transition.

"Mean Girls is a movie about Lindsay Lohan's breasts. At first when she's not popular, they're hidden. Then when she starts dressing as a Plastic, they come out and there they are for the rest of the movie. Even when she decides to become nice again, they're still on display, so she can use them when she needs to."