12A, 98 mins
If a Vegas film is difficult to pull off without resorting to formula, the teen movie genre is a veritable minefield of clichés. Fortunately, Tina Fey, the writer of Mean Girls, is sharp enough to turn high school truisms to her advantage with a playful, cruel and irresistibly funny script.
Lindsay Lohan stars as Cady Heron, the new girl in school. She finds herself embraced by the school’s most popular girls, the Plastics, a trio of pelmet-skirted über-bitches who delight in finding ever more devious means of undermining each other.
The tyrannical queen bees and the rigid high school hierarchies are familiar movie material from Heathers and countless lesser films. But Fey injects a real freshness into a well-worn scenario. Her ear for adolescent dialogue is finely tuned and, while the film is often very funny, there’s nothing glib about her handling of teen manipulation and emotional bullying, an issue she clearly takes very seriously.