Mean Girls

A sweet-souled daughter of zoologists, 15-year-old Cady (Lohan) goes from a lifetime of home-tutoring in ‘the African bush’ to a high school in suburban Chicago. Once there, she immediately grasps that the pitiless laws of the jungle apply equally readily to the various sharp-toothed species of American teendom. A scowly artiste (Caplan) and a zinger-zapping gay guy (Franzese) adopt comely Cady as one of their own and, just for laughs, set her on an undercover mission to infiltrate the a consortium of high priestesses led by terrifying alpha girl Regina (McAdams). Tina Fey’s deft, precisely detailed script dramatises Rosalind Wiseman’s bestseller ‘Queen Bees and Wannabes’. Happily, Fey and Waters gently tweak the studios’ usual high-gloss caricature of adolescence and aim for acutely hilarious and surprisingly empathic sociology.