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We ended up watching this film at the insistence of my ten year old daughter and I must admit it would not be my first choice of movie but after a diet of action movies thanks to the male voting block of her brother and me it was time for to have a choice so Mean Girls it was and besides the prospect of Lindsay Lohan in a school uniform was not totally without its appeal.
Now bearing in mind that the target market for this film is probably the 12 to 18 year old girl market I did not have very high expectations and therefore I was not disappointed to find myself not really enjoying the film and in what is meant to be a comedy I can count on one hand the number of times I laughed.
The Plot
Ms Lohan plays Cady who has spent the first fifteen years of her life being taught at home and living in Africa with her parents however after a move back to California she must now start attending normal school. Normal school in America means lots of cool kids and teachers with no authority
where everyone is identified by the people they mix with in a series of teen stereotypes such as jocks, skaters, Asian math geeks and the debate club.
Standing out like a sore thumb Cady struggles to make any friends until she falls in with Janis (Lizzy Caplin) and Damien ( Daniel Franzese) who are both social outcasts, he because he is more camp than Dale Winton and she because of some slur on her character. Cady soon also comes into contact with a nasty group called the Plastics who are the pretty rich girls who have their own dress code and look down on everyone else, they are led by Regina who is played by Rachel Adams who does a good job of playing the snooty little miss who is so far up her own behind that she cares about no one else, although just like American Pie it is the parents, in this case Regina mother, who almost steals the show with her attempts to be young looking and in with her daughters friends.
The Opinion
As I said earlier for me the lack of laughs lets this film down. Having said that my daughter laughed a lot more than I did so maybe it is doing something right.
The problem is that you can see the jokes coming a mile away, obviously at the start you have the new girl making the usual mistakes and failing to understand the environment in which she finds herself, the problem is that she seems to adapt with amazing speed for someone who has spent her entire life in Africa. When it does try to introduce some different comedy moments by comparing the behaviour of the school kids with wild animals I just felt that I had seen this type of humour better delivered in Scrubs.
The film does attempt to be a little different from the normal teen chick flicks however in attempting to introduce a bit of a dark side it fails to sit comfortably in either camp. It does not have the harsh cruelty of a film like Cruel Intentions and in Lohan it does not have a lead character that has the cute vulnerable appeal that Alicia Silverstone displayed in Clueless. What you end up with is something that sits uncomfortably between the two and in my opinion She's All That does a better job than Mean Girls in providing an appealing lead character facing up to some cruel cool kids.
What also lets this film down is the awful muddled ending where it lurches uncontrollably into sentimental slush which was as cringe worthy as a Halle Berry Oscar acceptance speech. I have never read the book Queen Bees and Wannabees by Rosalind Wiseman on which the film was based but this film has the feeling of a story that has a basic idea of the theme it wants to cash in on but no real idea of how to deliver an ending that will stand out from the crowd. In attempting to do this it seems to lose its bottle and decides to completely play it safe.
If I try to pick out some positives then I would say that for those in its target market or a mental age in that general area then you will probably enjoy the film. Fans of Lohan will probably enjoy it as she is competent in the role without really bringing anything special to the party apart from, in my opinion, looking pretty hot in a short little Santa outfit.
Not a film I would recommend but then I'm an old bloke who likes his films with a bit more violence in them or a decent storyline but I'm sure there will be a few gushing "oh my gawd" reviews of this film elsewhere on the site.
Thanks for reading and rating my review.
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The cutting wit of Tina Fey (the first female head writer for US comedy breeding ... more
groundSaturday Night Live) brilliantly fuses pop culture and smart satire. Fey wroteMean Girls, in which a formerly home-schooled girl named Cady (Lindsay Lohan) gets drop...
Postage & Packaging: £1.21 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
The cutting wit of Tina Fey (the first female head writer for US comedy breeding ... more
groundSaturday Night Live) brilliantly fuses pop culture and smart satire. Fey wroteMean Girls, in which a formerly home-schooled girl named Cady (Lindsay Lohan) gets drop...
Postage & Packaging: Free! Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours...
Raised in the African bush country by her zoologist parents, Cady (Lindsay Lohan) thinks ... more
she knows all about the survival of the fittest. But the law of the jungle takes on a whole new meaning when the home-schooled 15-year-old enters public high schoo...
Advantages: Extremely funny, very true to life and featuring a great cast Disadvantages: Makes you realise how mean us girls can really be! (not me obv...)
hannahmc3 02.11.2006 (02.11.2006)
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Review of Mean Girls (DVD)
![Mean Girls (Special Collector's Edition) [2004] [DVD]](http://picnicb.ciao.com/uk/78508437.jpg "Mean Girls (Special Collector's Edition) [2004] [DVD]")
Jun 3rd, 2006
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