Just when you thought the laugh-a-minute teen movie had been all but phased out of existence, here comes Tina Fey to the rescue. Mean Girls is a painfully accurate view of high school hierarchy that masks the sting with riotously funny and occasionally nonsensical one-liners. Mean Girls is equal parts savage and smart, and rarely feels like the scenes weren't pulled directly from the diary of a younger version of Fey. Rachel McAdams portrays the meanest girl with a gleefully exaggerated menace that has since been zapped out of her by the Hollywood rom-com factory, and that alone makes it a worthwhile viewing experience. When it first hit theaters, critics were quick to dismiss it as a toothless Heathers clone, but they were mostly overlooking the point. Mean Girls isn't meant to be all bile and grotesquery, it's meant to remind us that underneath all the bitchiness, bravado, and self-centeredness, high school girls are still human beings. They aren't expressly evil people. They're just your average dickheads like the rest of us.
