Offensive, loathsome, disgusting, immoral, and disturbing were adjectives I expected to use when I was describing The Girl Next Door, a film which I loved, a few weeks ago. Instead, they more accurately summarize the events which take place in Mean Girls, which was marketed as a harmless, funny movie for the entire family. I’m here to announce, contrary to what practically every critic on the face of the earth has claimed, it is a vile and filthy creation, which I would’ve easily given an R-rating if I was the MPAA. The characters are, indeed, mean and nasty, as the title describes. However, I never expected in a million years, that the protagonist, named Cady (pronounced: Kaay-dee, not Kad-dee), would fall into such a category. She is a victim of mean girls, but she also transforms into one herself. After this point in time, I could never look at her in the same light I did at the beginning of the movie. As far as I was concerned, she could never earn the sympathy that I once had for her back.

     Cady, played by Lindsay Lohan, is introduced on her first day of school, at sixteen years old. She’s now a junior in high school, but up until this point, has been home-schooled all of her life, living in Africa, where her parents worked as anthropologists. However, when her father was hired at Northwestern college, the family moved to the United States.

     Cady’s first day of high school is a shaky one, having to eat lunch in a bathroom-stall because she is not able to find a place to sit at the lunch tables, as well as bumping into her first period teacher, making her spill coffee all over herself. But, luckily, on her second day, Cady finds two friends, punker Janis (Lizzy Caplan) and gay-boy Damian (Daniel Franzese). They convince her to cut class; she’ll do anything to have a few friends. While sitting down on the grass, overlooking the ongoing P.E. classes and missing her first day of Health, she first lays eyes on The Plastics, a.k.a. the three “Mean Girls.” They have supposedly done some very bad things in their schooling careers; Janis, in particular, has been traumatized by their antagonistic ways. So, naturally, when they first find out about Cady, and want her to be apart of their clique, Janis convinces her new friend to act as an insider on the triangle of evil. This plan eventually evolves into a means of creating a plan to avenge them, and, before long, Cady has become a mean girl herself. Now, we know the film won’t end on such a note, and by its end, it becomes as clichéd and predictable as one would expect. However, it’s not just another stupid teen movie, hot off the assembly-line. Oh, no. It manages to be a nauseatingly unbelievable, hell-sent creation.

     The most painful moments come when Mean Girls tries to be funny, but fails. There are parallels drawn here between teenage girls and savanna-animals, which I found to be insultingly unreal and uncalled for. The concept surpasses contrivance and crosses the line, like a betrayal of humanity. There is no comedy in such comparisons—only perversion. In another scene, a little girl watches the college edition Girls Gone Wild, and practices flashing her breasts to an imaginary camera in the room, as the tape plays in the background. I wish this was some kind of social commentary regarding incoherent parents, as does director Mark Waters, but it isn’t. At this moment, I was amazed that I was watching a supposed PG-13 rated “comedy” and not an illegal copy of a video depicting child pornography. The little girl’s front is not shown, but the thought of such would certainly be enough to arouse pedophiles.

     Director Waters is, essentially, responsible for everything coming off the way it does; the exercise is so mean-spirited, the thought of it all is hard to bear. He wants the material to be something more than light-hearted, and instead, he ends up blocking arteries. Consider all the positives of the movie: a great performance by Lohan, creative writing by Tina Fey, and some interesting outlooks on life. These could’ve been combined together to form a great movie, but Waters’ experimentation doesn’t form a worthy thesis. Mean Girls is entirely superficial, and its execution is lacking the wit that the very root of it contains. The whole experience is kind of degrading to all of the talent actually involved, let alone the audience, if you think about it.

     Usually, the films I deem to be terrible bore me to death. That’s not the case with this one, though. I was actually pretty enthralled by it, but my fascination was only a dangerous thing. I was able to pick up on so many layers of filth, enabling me to further insult the horrendous piece of trash that is Mean Girls. The only question I still have in my mind regarding it is whether or not Waters knows just how drastic his case of mental illness really is.

-Danny, Bucket Reviews (5.1.2004)

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