Mean Girls 2

Kids today. Those whippersnappers are a jaded lot, with their Lady Gagas and their internet pornography and their doing-drugs-and-having-sex-at-a-younger-age-than-ever. No longer is it enough to simply reveal the contents of a gossipy "Burn Book," as one of the Plastics (an elite squad of three popular high school girls) did in 2004's Mean Girls. No, you've got to push the envelope to get these kids to feel anything nowadays. Now, if you're one of the Plastics and there's a Lindsay Lohan-type new kid invading your turf (in this case played by Meaghan Martin), you've got to bug her first date, then broadcast the audio over the school P.A., revealing to the entire student body that this girl is – gasp! – a virgin. You've also got to superglue the poor girl to her motorbike, poison the pizza at her party and sabotage her father's work with the specific intention of having him fired. Of course, if you're the Lohan surrogate, you must retaliate by staging a birthday party the same day as an enemy's competing shindig and inserting green dye into an enemy's facial mask. The title is not a misnomer: Mean Girls 2 concentrates so single-mindedly on people trying to hurt one another it sometimes feels more like a spiritual sequel to Saw. Though it follows the basic template of the beloved-by-many first film, Mean Girls 2 leaves out anything that might look even remotely like a real high school experience, and since Meaghan Martin becomes immediately more popular than the Plastics (who only seem to have each other as friends), where's the tension? By the time it lumbers to its incompetently edited football climax, even diehard fans will know that this is one worthless cash-in. The best of the DVD extras is an interview with Tim Meadows, the first film's only returning cast member, and the only person who seems to understand the movie he's in, correctly observing that any principal who acts like the one he plays would have been fired long ago. Other extras include the usual making-of puff pieces and gag reels, as well as anti-bullying PSAs, because if Mean Girls 2 was made for one reason, it was to stop the spread of bullying.