Mean Girls Review

Tina Fey built the script from Rosalind Wiseman's Queen Bees and Wannabes, a nonfiction guide for parents to the cliques and quiet warfare of teenage girls, and kept its eye for social machinery. Lorne Michaels produced, Mark Waters directed, and Fey plays Ms. Norbury, the math teacher who tells an assembly of girls to stop calling each other names.

The writing is the thing. Cady reads North Shore High like the animal kingdom her parents studied, and the jokes come from the rules: pink on Wednesdays, the Burn Book, a word one Plastic keeps trying to make happen. Nearly every line became a catchphrase, yet the comedy stings because the cruelty is accurate. Lindsay Lohan makes Cady's slide from newcomer to queen bee both funny and a little chilling, Rachel McAdams makes Regina's charm the most frightening thing about her, and Amanda Seyfried, in her first film, is a deadpan marvel as Karen.

It looks like the mid-budget studio comedy it is, flat and functional, and the Spring Fling finale ties its lessons up too neatly. Neither dents it: few comedies of any kind are this quotable or this exact about how cruelty works. Two decades on it is still the high school comedy others get measured against, and it became a Broadway musical in 2018 and a film of that musical in 2024.