Mean Girls will undoubtedly accomplish one thing, it will solidify Lyndsay Lohan as a star. After showing a great deal of promise in Freaky Friday, Lyndsay Lohan's performance here requires that she manage a broad range of acting, much of it tip toeing upon the subtle thin ice of satire. A feat which she performs with flying colors thanks to a smart script written by SNL headwriter Tina Fey (based on Rosalind Wiseman's best seller "Queen Bees and Wannabes) and re-teaming with Freaky Friday director Mark Waters who coaxed the first effective performance out of the yet unproven Lohan.

At first glance I figured this was going to be another shlocky teen clap-trap with Freddie Prinze Jr. hiding in there somewhere, but when I heard Fey's name attached I suspected this might be something special. The story sets up an interesting experiment in human social interaction. Lohan's character (Cady) arrives in a tough Chicago area High School as the ultimate social "tabula rasa." The reason she's such a blank slate is due to the fact that her parents are zoologists who raised and home-schooled Cady in the wilds of Africa. The filmmakers make good use of the fact that there are a number of similarities to high school life and the laws of the jungle and they inject a few fantasy scenes to drive the point home. (For example the central fountain at the mall, is transformed into the watering hole of the wild.)

Upon her arrival the lonely and overwhelmed Cady is immediately befriended by a couple of social outcasts - Janis (Lizzy Caplan), a Goth girl who is ridiculed as a lesbian, but isn't, and Damian (Daniel Franzese), a gay guy who proudly left the closet years ago. Janis and Damian right away give her a condensed version of the realities of life in this new jungle - teaching her about "the plastics" who prowl the hallways like royalty and whose leader, Regina (Rachel McAdams) sports the most venomous pair of fangs in school. Quite amusingly Regina's court of bitches-in-training are a clueless twosome, who are nothing more than sycophants disguised as hotties who would be wholly unable to assume the duties as Queen Bee should Regina be suspended or transferred. It is a fragile framework that this social strata is built upon.

The plot really gets cooking when this framework is put to the test by our intrepid outcasts and their new hottie of a poster girl (Cady). As it turns out Regina takes notice of Cady and realizes that she might be of use in her "Regina regime," which gives Janis and Damien one hell of a good idea. If you've yet to see this coming, they talk Cady into joining the plastics on an undercover mission aimed at digging up some sort of dirt, or chink in her armor that they can exploit in order to topple the "queen of mean's" dick-tatorship.

It's at this point that the movie becomes tricky. With all this new found power at her fingertips Cady becomes enamored of the ways of High School royalty which threatens to turn her innocent and generous heart into plastic. This sequence also offers Fey the opportunity to expose these plastic princesses not as cut-out caricatures, but as young insecure girls confronting their own issues of self-worth and fear of failure. The pressure they are under is much greater than the common AV nerd, is the point she makes here.

The film's major challenge (and I think they pull it off quite well) is to keep the audience on Cady's side during her undercover odyssey. This they do by portraying it as a wonderful eye-opening experience in self-discovery. You can't blame her for reveling in her virgin turn in the cat-bird's seat, but Fey challenges you pretty hard as Cady becomes increasingly savvy about game-playing and much, much meaner. Fey deftly pushes you to that point where you're ready to turn on Cady altogether, or remain hopeful that the goodness of her heart has only temporarily become dormant. This is where this writer is going to leave you hanging. Suffice to say that I really enjoyed this film, and it is a film that a wide audience can enjoy - from adults to tweens. It's by no means a perfect movie, but diefinitley a winner in large part because of a very smart script based on a book with a wonderful premise and a marvelous star-making turn by Lohan.