OxfordPress.com

Grade: B-

Verdict: Reasonably mean and certainly funny, but eventually wimps out.

"Mean Girls" isn't mean enough.

A clever and often stinging study of the curdled world of high school politics, the movie ultimately goes soft. Which isn't what you expect from the tart-tongued Tina Fey, best known as co-anchor of "Saturday Night Live's" often sharp "Weekend Update" segment. Apparently, her take-no-prisoners wit needed diluting when she transferred her writing to movies.

Still, the film is not altogether toothless Ñ especially in its first half-hour or so. Fifteen-year-old Cady (Lindsay Lohan) is fresh off the farm, so to speak. Make that fresh off the veldt. Having spent the past 12 years in Africa with her zoologist parents, she's about to experience the questionable pleasures of an American high school for the first time.

She gets a double dose immediately. The Plastics, the ultimate cool-girl trio, invite Cady to eat lunch with them because she's pretty. Like the Heathers of a decade ago, the nasty but gorgeous Regina (Rachel McAdams) and her followers Ñ the dim Karen (Amanda Seyfried) and the desperate-to-be-just-like-Regina Gretchen (Lacey Chabert) Ñ have an arcane set of inviolable rules. Tube tops forbidden two days in a row, ponytails only once a week, and ex-boyfriends are definitely off-limits. "That's, like, the rules of feminism," one of these petty teen tyrants explains.

The more Cady learns how to fit in, the less likable she becomes. To her family, to her first friends (goth girl Lizzy Caplan and proudly outed chubby boy Daniel Franzese) and, ultimately, to herself.

Lohan, who intrepidly filled Hayley Mills' sneakers in the remake of "The Parent Trap" and butted heads with Jamie Lee Curtis in "Freaky Friday," has grown into an accomplished and beautiful actress. Her interplay with the equally good (and gorgeous) McAdams, Seyfried and Chabert is tone-perfect. Fey has a supporting role as a dryly humorous teacher. Tim Meadows, Amy Poehler and Ana Gasteyer, all current or former "SNL"-ers, appear as well (no wonder: Lorne Michaels is the producer).

There are occasional flashes of Fey's lean-and-mean funny bone. She knows the ruthlessness of the three-way-call sneak attack (where one caller doesn't know a third is listening to the mean comments) and the freeze-out whisper campaign. She lays out the byzantine geography of a high school cafeteria (nerds, girls who eat their feelings, JV jocks .Ê.Ê. ) beautifully.

"Mean Girls" has more on its mind than "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" but less nerve than "Heathers." On the current scale of teen girl movies, it falls somewhere in quality near "The Prince & Me," better than "Ella Enchanted," not as enchanting as "13 Going on 30."