Jennifer Kaytin Robinson's Do Revenge does its very best, full of big characters, great fashion and quotable lines, but it just doesn't have the wit of Tina Fey's Mean Girls screenplay.

Drea Torres (Camila Mendes) is her exclusive Florida prep school's former mean queen but a sex tape with her former boyfriend Max (Austin Abrams) has been leaked and, like the Emperor's New Clothes, the student body now sees through Drea's mean girl act.

She has become a social pariah and is ignored by her former friends.

She befriends Eleanor (Maya Hawke), the school's newest arrival, a girl who has her own axe to grind with one of the school's bossy student leaders, Carissa (Ava Capri), a girl who outed Eleanor at school camp years earlier.

Drea sees a kindred spirit in Eleanor and the girls form a pact - they both want their respective enemies to pay for their actions but it would be completely obvious who was responsible should their foes get a comeuppance.

If they enacted each other's revenge, they might get said revenge, and get away with their own reputations intact.

First on Drea's hit list is former boyfriend Max whom she suspected of leaking the sex tape. She sets Eleanor up as an intriguing new target for Max's affections.

Next is Eleanor's school camp bully Carissa, who they discover to be growing marijuana and psilocybin mushrooms in the school's gardening program, and the revenge nearly writes itself.

While Drea begins to worry that Eleanor is enjoying her newfound popularity with her former clique, there is more about these two friends that the other needs to uncover.

Kaytin Robinson's screenplay, penned with Celeste Ballard, draws on many references - the obvious ones being teen comedies, from Clueless and The Breakfast Club to Mean Girls.

But deeper than this, there are identity-changing themes from Twelfth Night, and duplicitous characters to do Hitchcock proud - Strangers on a Train is a particular reference.

Their teen-speak dialogue is a little fun, definitely targeting its Netflix demographic.

But the supposed comedic setups the writers create for these girls to enact are, quite literally, criminal.

I don't want to give too many of the plot's twists and turns away as I make this point but the girls spike the school dance attendees with the psilocybin mushrooms that Carissa has been growing in the school greenhouse.

Literally seven to 10 years of prison time right there for administering poison with intent to harm, and yet the writers pass this off as a comedic setup.

Drea becomes a social outcast when her sex tape is leaked from her phone, and while we know school students can be pure evil, the slut-shaming she endures is the opposite of the woke internet's approach to acts like this.

It all seems so counterintuitive.

We're supposed to like these characters enough to want to love them as much as we love Mean Girls' Gretchen Wieners or Regina George.

However, there aren't too many redeeming behaviours on display here, from the characters or from the writing.

Jumping down from my soap box, I have to say the filmmakers do construct a fun bubble-pop aesthetic, through Alana Morshead's bright costuming and the music by Este Haim (of the eponymous band).

Audiences already adore Maya Hawke from her work on Netflix's Stranger Things and she is great here.

She's an amalgam of your teenage memories - being the daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, both lines of genes run strong with her mother's statuesque height and her dad's charming freckles.

Of the rest of the cast, Buffy's Sarah Michelle Geller stands out as the school's world-weary principal.