Admit It, The Ending of 'Mean Girls' is Bad

In the 17 years since Mean Girls first came out, it has become a beloved film for a generation who wear pink on Wednesdays and would never, ever try to make "fetch" happen.

But the bigger the cult grows around the film, the harder it is for people accept that the ending...well, kinda sucks.

A key ingredient to Mean Girls' success is its endlessly quotable script from Tina Fey, perfecting the rapid-fire joke style that would turn 30 Rock into her masterpiece a few years later.

There is no doubting how funny Mean Girls is — most of its funniest moments have been memed and quoted into oblivion. They are laugh out loud funny and have connected with so many people.

The script is so funny, in fact, that many moments of genius often go undetected. Sure, "you go Glen Coco" and "Danny DeVito, I love your work" are gems, but what about the hilariously delivered "it's been two weeks, and all we've done is make her face smell like a foot?"

Another contributing factor of its success is that it gets that it is called Mean Girls, and is not afraid to be vicious — especially compared to tamer teen movies. You cannot imagine Clueless' Cher, for example, ever calling someone a "fugly sl**" or a "fat wh**e." And yet these both feature in the notorious Burn Book.

All of the glorious scheming and bitching, however, means the ending falls flat.

A reminder for those who have not watched the film since the last Mean Girls Day (October 3, the date when Aaron asks Cady what day it is): We are at prom; The Plastics have broken up; Regina George is in a spinal halo after being hit by a bus; Cady wins prom queen.

Lindsay Lohan's character then splits her crown and shares it among her fellow nominees (which in itself is absurd, given the amount of people she dishes it out to and how large the chunks she breaks off are), before it is revealed that everyone at North Shore lives happily ever after – or at least until they go to college in a few years.

The problem with this ending is that it undermines everything that we have been told over the course of the movie. The biggest repeating motif of the film is that the school is a jungle, with every species in an uneasy alliance with the others that could tip into violence at any time. And jungles do not tend to end in amicable truces where all of the creatures learn to live in perfect harmony. Even in Disney's Lion King, Simba has to kill Scar to regain equilibrium on the Savannah.

And what of the other characters? Sure, Regina is probably on some pretty strong pain meds after being ploughed by a bus, but the girl we have come to love and fear in the movie is not going to be happy with a few inches of shiny plastic, given to her by the girl who came in and tried to steal her spot.

There is a better ending somewhere there. Regina could have gotten her final, Carrie-style revenge on the friend-turned-usurper that had stolen her position as head Plastic. Or the movie could have taken a leaf from the Scarface book and given Cady everything she wanted, only to have her realise that it is hollow and lonely, and that she'd constantly have to defend herself from the next generation of Plastics.

The contrived ending is clearly a studio-forced, neat and tidy conclusion. The same studio that tried to make the film softer and more family friendly by changing the script's "masturbated with a hot dog" into "made out with a hot dog" is also unlikely to have released a film that ended with as much viciousness as this film deserved.

There is some good stuff in the finale, though. The moment where Regina's spinal halo clinks against Shane Oman's prom king crown as they try to kiss is a beautiful piece of physical comedy, and the Damien and Janice kiss undermines the too-neat finales of other teen couples, where everyone ends up together. These spikier moments, however, are drowned out by the pure saccharine that is the rest of the ending.

The lackluster ending was something mentioned in a number of reviews at the time. A BBC critic called the conclusion "a little too cosy," while the New York Times called it "a be-yourself finale that, while standard for such movies, doesn't seem in keeping with this picture."

Though the ending of Mean Girls is bad, it could have been worse. Damien actor Daniel Franzese revealed in a Cosmopolitan interview that the original ending revolved around Ms. Norbury being arrested for pushing drugs, after the police find some confiscated ecstasy. He also indicated the final scene would have involved Damien giving a spirited defence argument for his teacher in court.

That would have been a bad ending in a different way, as it would have moved attention away from the central story and onto a secondary character played by the person who wrote the script. Either way, the fact that it could have been worse does not excuse what we got.

Of course, times have moved on in the 17 years since the film came out. Cell phones are noticeably absent in Mean Girls, and the Burn Book was the nearest thing the Plastics had to Twitter. Sadly, in real life we do have Twitter, where rabid fans will ratio even the smallest critique of their favorite movies, even where they are deeply flawed (hello, Shrek). Still, those fans have to admit (even if it is just to themselves as they call the movie's critics a "grotsky little byatch"), that the film could have had a better ending.