IF A school had set out to make an instructional video to encourage its female students to be nicer to each other it would probably have turned out as a carbon copy of Mean Girls.

The film sets up its heroine, Cady, (Lindsay Lohan) as a total outsider to the world of high school. Having been raised in Africa and home-schooled by her parents, she is at home in the real jungle but has no idea how to cope with the jungle that is school.

This then allows the film to function rather like an anthropologist, focusing on the girls' ritualistic behaviour, and to question its appropriateness.

Remember the bits in Grange Hill where they'd get all preachy and explain good conduct to the kids watching? Well, this is the big-screen version of those moments.

That's not to say that encouraging girls not to be so mean is a bad thing. Indeed, parents will probably be queuing up to take their daughters to see this in the hope of modifying their behaviour.

But some of the target audience of this film - teenage girls - may feel that they are watching a film that is aimed at them rather than for them.

There's a line between responsible film-making and attempted brainwashing and, although well-meaning, Mean Girls skips back and forth across it.

That said, the film is sure to pull in a good-sized audience thanks to its strong cast, generally good dialogue and fairly clever manipulation of the teen-flick genre.

This film ticks off all the requisite features that go into making a teen film: the popular but nasty girls, jocks, geeks, cool kids, an outsider, a prom, underage drinking which ends badly, a house party - the list goes on.

But it doesn't present them all in a completely formulaic way.

What's more, the film doesn't assume that it can palm shoddy goods off on its youthful audience by making sure that they are nicely packaged - there's some good dialogue, well developed characters and a few very funny jokes.

There's not a lot here for adult audiences but teenagers will probably love Mean Girls and if it encourages a few of them to treat each other with a bit more respect, that can't be a bad thing.

Rating: 6/10