Mean Girls 2 (2011)

Mean Girls 2 arrives seven years after its predecessor, direct to ABC Family, directed by Melanie Mayron, and burdened with the thankless task of continuing a franchise whose author declined to participate. Tina Fey was asked to write it and said no. The result is a television movie shot in twenty days in Atlanta, in which a new transfer student named Jo breaks her own rule about avoiding girl drama and finds herself at war with a queen bee named Mandi. The machinery is familiar: the Plastics, the prank escalation, the homecoming vote. Tim Meadows returns as the principal, presumably as a professional courtesy to himself.

The film's cultural inventory is sparse. The cast is largely white, with a pair of Latino performers (Diego Boneta, Maiara Walsh) dropped in without comment, which is casting as ordinary practice, not statement. No character is gay, no one discusses race, and the environment does not come up. The one charitable impulse on screen involves a homecoming fund destined for an animal shelter, and even that is stolen by the villains as a plot mechanism. Wealth appears as a neutral tool: a rich father offers to buy Jo's college tuition, and money changes hands to move the story along. Nobody indicts a system. They just want their cash back.

A woman directed it, and the plot runs on female friendship, which lends a faint feminist texture to an otherwise conventional clique comedy. The hypochondriac and the ditzy one exist as punchlines, not as portraits of anything. The moral, arriving in the final act, is that Jo should be herself and stop imitating her enemy, and the film delivers this through flag football and a text message rather than a speech. It is a mild lesson, dutifully resolved, and then everyone goes to college. The whole enterprise is harmless, forgettable, and exactly as ambitious as its twenty day schedule suggests.