I was expecting something silly. A string of scenes of girls doing pranks on each other. Slapstick jokes about teenage girls doing stupid things to each other that only other teenage girls would find humorous. Boy, was I wrong.

Mean Girls is a relentless, full throttle assault on teenage vanity. Why can’t screenwriter Tina Fey write stuff like this for Saturday Night Live? Perhaps it's because Mean Girls is based on a sociological study, Rosalind Wiseman's Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence. But Fey successfully puts the science into narrative form and creates a satire strong enough to stand up with the classics.

Home schooled Cady (Lindsay Lohan) goes to high school for the first time, and we get to experience her new life in high school as she enters the jungle. She quickly makes friends with the strange ones, the goth Janis (Lizzy Caplan) and gay Damian (Daniel Franzese). She also manages to get in with the pretty, high maintenance girls appropriately called The Plastics, which include the ringleader Regina George (Rachel McAdams), the pretty Gretchen (Lacey Chabert) and the air-headed Karen (Amanda Seyfried). All of the girls are perfectly cast.

Cady begins her acquaintance with The Plastics to spy on them and report to Janis, but quickly becomes absorbed in their world. What follows is a slightly exaggerated, but fundamentally honest (and frightening) portrait of immature teenage girls. These girls are fundamentally selfish, but of course they don’t see it. They all are constantly looking down on others, but always think it’s justified. They are vain, materialistic, image-obsessed, judgmental, and wholly self-absorbed. All of them. And they only think the others are.

Mean Girls pulls down the curtain on them all. In a wholly expected yet wholly shocking finale, Fey uses multiple climaxes to cast a mirror in these girls’ eyes and charge them into self-awareness. Mean Girls succeeds exactly where 13 Going on 30 and The Girl Next Door failed. This is a genuine teen coming of age story. I also love the scenes, from Cady’s perspective, that see the behavior of the students like unto African animals. Humorous and thematically effective, it becomes strongest when Cady falls into the pack herself.

Not to stop at teen vice, Mean Girls also takes shots at the sex-ed system and poor parenting. Every single line has something to say. There are very few lines or scenes played up just for laughs sake, and yet we’re constantly laughing. Tina Fay plays a teacher and is joined by other SNLers including Amy Poehler, who also plays a teacher, Ana Gasteyer, who plays Cady’s mom, and Tim Meadows, who plays the High School principle with a perfect blend of bravery and timidity in the high school jungle.

Mean Girls is as interesting as a documentary on its subject, as funny as such a rich script can be, and compelling where it ought to be. Mean Girls may be the best written teen movie ever.

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