PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 04/30/04)

Sugar and spice and everything nice . . . Yeah, whatever. The girls in Tina Fey’s screenwriting debut are made from something else entirely. They’re two-faced, back-stabbing, boyfriend-stealing, life-crushing popularity queens. Basically, without crossing over into Thirteen’s parent-alert territory, these girls are more like the ones most public school survivors knew growing up than any of those phony Noxzema girls who keep turning up in teen movies.

Mean Girls is a would-be camp classic that admirably risks its own popularity to call an end to the "girl-on-girl violence" that makes high school so hard and movies like 13 Going on 30 so much fun. In her best performance yet, Lindsay Lohan stars as Cady Heron, a high school junior who’s been miraculously spared the indignity of public school until now. As she trades the comforts of home-schooling for the horrors of homeroom, her biggest challenge is fitting in with (and eventually subverting) the Plastics, the elite clique in the cafeteria.

Naive to the point of idiocy, Cady falls for the popular girls’ sly games of entrapment ("So you agree? You think you’re really pretty?"), letting them make over her independent spirit to fit their mold. But friendship takes a back seat when Cady develops a crush on group leader Regina’s ex-boyfriend, and Regina responds by snagging him back just to spite her. This is war!

As the situation escalates, Mean Girls steers toward familiar teen-movie hyperbole, but it's the way the girls plot their sabotage while doling out empty compliments that keeps things real. Big-screen high schools have mellowed since the days of Dangerous Minds and Lean on Me, but Mean Girls is so mild, it makes Grease look rough by comparison. These kids don’t have after-school jobs, homework, divorced families, or even much of a life beyond the mall. Not that they need to, for the film to be relevant, but Mean Girls depicts the kind of traumatic high school experience that might await spoiled rich girls who grow up in two-parent households with designer clothes and Escalades. As it turns out, Fey's just the person to teach them a lesson.

—Peter Debruge