We Lovingly Ranked All The Teen Movies Lindsay Lohan Made In The Early ’00s

Lindsay Lohan was a straight-up teen idol in the early ’00s, along with Hilary Duff and Amanda Bynes. The three were basically the holy trinity of Disney stars.

Lindsay starred in five Disney movies by the age of 19. It was before there were any Lindsay-related scandals, before Lohan’s Beach Club, and before her turn on the first season of The Masked Singer.

Obvs The Masked Singer is why we’ve been thinking about her a lot lately. Her reactions to the reveals of C-list Australian celebrities she absolutely has never heard of instantly ingratiated her with the Australian viewing public.

She’s always just been trying her best, bringing an international legitimacy to a reality TV singing show that has turned out to be weirdly engrossing. 

But it’s time to kick it back to old school Lindsay, the stuff of tween sleepovers, the movies you watched after you’d already seen The Parent Trap too many times on Channel 7. We’re talking iconic early ’00s t(w)een flicks.

Here’s our ranking of Linsday Lohan movies from 2000 to 2005 (the good years):

6. Get a Clue (2002)

Get a Clue was one of those Disney channel movies that only families who paid for Foxtel got to see. It sounds like a family movie version of Veronica Mars: Lindsay plays Lexy, a teenager who investigates the disappearance of one of her teachers. Aside from the presence of the always-charismatic Lindsay, the cast list has us sitting here wondering, ‘Who?’ That is why this film is ranked last.

5. Life-Size (2000)

Lindsay Lohan is Casey, a girl who tries to bring her mother back from the dead but accidentally turns her toy doll, Eve, into a living, breathing human being. It’s a star turn from model Tyra Banks as Eve, but otherwise, the movie was deeply unmemorable. We think it was about Casey processing her grief and Eve learning the secret to being an actually popular doll? What?

4. Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005)

Something about the car-racing content made it so we couldn’t actually handle this film. Cars? Sounds like boy stuff! Yucko. Sure, it’s part of a whole franchise, but it’s a boring franchise about a car with a human temperament and the humans who become, like, totally obsessed with him. Let’s instead focus on this supporting cast: Justin Long as Lindsay’s love interest, Breckin Meyer as her big brother, Michael Keaton as her dad, and Matt Dillon as the villain. Better than #5 and #6, but not even close to the calibre of #3.

3. Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (2004)

The core duo of Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen was Lindsay and the underappreciated Alison Pill. It really is exactly what it says on the teen – Lindsay’s Lola is a future thespian, like every other 15-year-old girl. She’s certainly got a flair for the overdramatic, and also, for telling bald-faced lies, again like every other 15-year-old girl. This movie weirdly taught me about Pygmalion, and also that even precocious, fibbing teens can be redeemed.

Fun fact: Lindsay won a Teen Choice Award for this movie, and absolutely deserved it.

2. Freaky Friday (2003)

Name me a more iconic duo than Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan. I’ll wait.

Continuing her trend of starring in remakes of old-arse movies, Lohan appeared here as a teen brat, who ends up switching bodies with her mom, because of a magical fortune cookie (don’t read too much into it). That’s an opportunity for Lindsay to play a strait-laced mum character, even while she’s still in her teens, while Jamie Lee Curtis got to crack out the eyeliner and teen slang. It ruled, helped us learn about empathy, and also featured the teen heartthrob of the season, Chad Michael Murray.

1. Mean Girls (2004)

Who would we be as a generation without the influence of Mean Girls? Basically, without Mean Girls, there’s no thank u, next.

Mean Girls saw Lindsay as Cady from Africa turning up at a new high school, and winding up losing herself inside a pink-wearing clique, the Plastics –led by the formidable Regina George. We got Amy Poehler as Regina’s v. enthusiastic dance mom, we got “She doesn’t even go here!”, and we got one of the best love interests of the decade in Aaron Samuels. It was a story about friendship for our times, and where we all learned, well, how not to be such bitches to each other.

Thank you, Lindsay Lohan, for teaching our teenage selves so many valuable lessons.