Mean Girls

A new term at high school is even more of a trauma for Cady (Lindsay Lohan) than it is for everybody else, since she is not just an out-of-towner but an out-of-Africa, her parents having raised her as a bush baby. Now she is confronted with the complexity of school loyalties and fads, which-as we are reminded by innumerable slo-mo sequences with an added roartrack-are twice as bloodlusty as the lives of African fauna. Her first friends are Janis (Lizzy Caplan) and Damian (Daniel Franzese), who dare her to hang out with the second wave-a trio of acid beauties, led by the queenly Regina (Rachel McAdams). The twist is that Cady, in pretending to fall for their spoilt ways, really does fall for them, and the problem is that we ourselves never fall for this notion of Cady as weak-willed. Though the movie sags in the second half, your spirits are kept up by the steady flow of slashing lines-courtesy of Tina Fey, who not only wrote the script but also stars as Cady's teacher. If anything, the grownups-especially the school principal, played by Tim Meadows, of whom the picture needs much more-tend to nudge these pushy teen-agers into the wings.