Mean Girls (2004)

Is Mean Girls a Christmas film? Well it’s irrelevant. Distressingly, Mean Girls is twenty years old next year, and its endless quotability and enduring legacy means that it’s not likely to be disappearing from our cultural radars anytime soon. And deservedly so; despite the inevitable Clueless (1995) comparisons, Mean Girls is absolutely its own film. Lindsay Lohan (probably her best film performance) is Cady, who has recently moved from Africa, moving into a public school for the first time. She befriends the ‘Plastics’ (the most popular clique in school) originally in an undercover role, helping Janis and “too gay to function” Damian to tear the Plastics apart from the inside out. It doesn’t quite all go to plan- well naturally, this is a high school dramedy; but the difference between this and several of its predecessors is that it’s original, tight and very smart. Not Another Teen Movie (2001) made the point that the genre had lost its originality, with pastiche and parody seemingly the only way it could go. Like it or not, Not Another Teen Movie did its job, ushering in a new wave of teen films with Mean Girls at the forefront, followed by Superbad (2007), Juno (2007) and Easy A (2010) to name but a few. Mean Girls is also notable for kick starting the career of Rachel McAdams, who is brilliantly cast as Regina, the head of the Plastics. McAdams hasn’t looked back since, Oscar nominated for Spotlight in 2015, and the same can be said for Amanda Seyfried, who was nominated for Mank in 2021. So it’s a real shame that the main star of the film, Lindsay Lohan hasn’t hit the heights of the others. Of course there are plenty of personal reasons for this, but it’s unfortunate that Mean Girls wasn’t the start of a blisteringly successful career for Lohan; she is brilliant here. Mean Girls is one of the most important films of the noughties, as well as being one of the best. 8.0/10