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Overall Rating
 Awesome: 37.1%
Worth A Look: 45.7%
Average: 8.06%
Pretty Bad: 2.69%
Total Crap: 6.45%
11 reviews, 120 user ratings
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| Mean Girls |
by Preston Jones
"Meeow!"

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There’s nothing worse than a satire losing its bite before it’s finished mauling its prey. Unfortunately, such is the case with director Mark Waters’ Mean Girls.Razor-edged swipes at high school cliques, the pressure to conform and the glossy inanity of modern suburban life are but a few of the targets at which screenwriter Tina Fey (of “Saturday Night Live” fame) takes aim – in adapting the nonfiction “Queen Bees and Wannabes” by Rosalind Wiseman, Fey pulls a little from other high school comedy flicks such as Heathers , Clueless , Election and Jawbreaker to cover the almost been-there, done-that air that the film carries. Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan), freshly arrived back in the States from Africa with her academic parents, finds herself in a public school setting for the first time. It’s debatable how lucky the turn of events are, but at any rate, Cady finds herself welcomed by the school’s A-listers, a group dubbed “the Plastics,” led by head Plastic Regina George (Rachel McAdams). Things move along swimmingly until Cady gets the hots for Aaron Samuels (Jonathan Bennett), who just happens to be Regina’s ex – of course, you can see where all this will lead. While the main female players all pull off icy cold bitch to perfection, the real treats in Mean Girls lie in the supporting performances, namely Fey as Ms. Norbury, a put-upon math teacher, ex-“SNL”er Tim Meadows as Mr. Duvall, the Joe Clark-wannabe principal and Daniel Franzese as Damian, a flamboyantly homosexual companion of Cady’s. Waters, previously of the wildly successful Freaky Friday remake, which also starred Lohan, bares the film’s fangs early but frustratingly, retracts them in order to make way for a maudlin, after school special finale – Fey’s screenplay, no doubt hampered by the audience-friendly PG-13 rating, really needs the freedom of a R to stretch and annihilate its comedic targets. The watered-down final third really detracts from the earlier, sharper humor.Mean Girls is an easy matinee recommendation and will likely find a much healthier second life on video (here’s hoping for a meaner R-rated version) – if it’s too soon for you to revisit the horrors of high school, perhaps waiting until you can sob to yourself at home is the best option.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=9283&reviewer=304 originally posted: 06/28/04 10:10:39
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USA 30-Apr-2004 (PG-13) DVD: 21-Sep-2004
UK N/A
Australia 24-Jun-2004 (M)
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