I Know What You Did Last Summer, and it sure wasn’t anything good | Canada Voices

I Know What You Did Last Summer

Directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson

Written by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson and Sam Lansky

Starring Chase Sui Wonders, Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jennifer Love Hewitt

Classification 14A; 111 minutes

Opens in theatres July 18

“Zero stars.” So proclaims one of the few surviving characters of I Know What You Did Last Summer toward the end of the film, bemoaning their bloody trials and tribulations. That ranking is a bit harsh – this is more of a 1.5- or two-star affair – but the sentiment is apt. For every tiny thing that director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s sequel to the original 1997 slasher does right, it executes a million other things gigantically wrong.

Just as the original film, directed by Jim Gillespie, chased the genre fumes of Wes Craven’s 1996 blockbuster Scream – the films shared a screenwriter in Kevin Williamson, whose previously disregarded I Know… script was hastily greenlit after the surprise success of Scream – Robinson’s version tries to ape the vibes of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s 2022 Scream to create a so-called “legacy sequel.” The basic conceit: follow the continuity of the first film, but much further down the timeline. This way the filmmakers can spark nostalgia by including original characters, while also focusing on new, fresher-faced heroes who will presumably appeal to the next generation of moviegoers. Every demographic wins!

But if that sounds like a strategy more crass than clever, then you’re already halfway inside the mind of I Know… long-time series producer Neal H. Moritz, who milked this particular franchise dry over the past three decades. Yet, if you don’t remember 1998’s I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, or its 2006 direct-to-video spinoff I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, or even the short-lived 2021 Prime Video series, also confusingly titled I Know What You Did Last Summer; don’t worry in the slightest. None of it – truly, nothing – matters in order to enjoy this new version. Because enjoying it is a complete impossibility.

The narrative mechanics are exactly the same, to a distressingly unoriginal degree. Four super-sexy friends – the smart one (Chase Sui Wonders), the ditz (Madelyn Cline), the stupid stud (Jonah Hauer-King), and the even stupider stud (Tyriq Withers) – gather in the North Carolina harbour town of Southport during the July 4 weekend. There, they unintentionally cause a fatal road accident and collectively decide to cover it up rather than confess to police. Well, surprise, that very bad decision comes back to haunt them as a mysterious stalker in a rain slicker begins to pick the beautiful people off one-by-one with his or her shiny hook.

Eventually the film reintroduces Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr.’s characters from the original film, giving them pseudo-mentorship roles to the new potential victims. Although, the older characters cannot offer much advice other than “run” and “run faster.” Which is what the bulk of the film is: characters dashing to and fro until they’re finally, mercifully shanked.

Review: Dark and stormy Japanese thriller Cloud is an excellent exploration of a market driven by greed

Robinson infrequently adds a minor visual flair or cruel-but-cute gag to the proceedings – a bath bomb that turns blood red, a cemetery so improbably shrouded in North Carolina fog and mist that it feels imported from Michael Jackson’s Thriller video. But mostly, this is murder-by-numbers material. The slayings are dull (for an R-rated film, its violence is shockingly bland), the characters talk as if they’re trapped inside a TikTok algorithm (“It’s giving nuptials!”), and the twist(s) so visible you could see them back in ’97.

While one-time teen dreams Hewitt and Prinze Jr. earn their paydays by lending a semblance of gravitas to the silliness, their brief on-screen presence only underline the lifelessness of today’s fresh meat.

Cline is unbearable as a whiny prom queen, while a floundering Sui Wonders seems like a totally different performer than the one who gives as good as she gets on Seth Rogen’s Apple TV+ series The Studio. The only young actor to emerge from the film intact – in terms of his reputation, if perhaps not his vital organs – is Withers, who channels a young Channing Tatum in his knowing obliviousness.

“Nostalgia is overrated,” Hewitt’s character says toward the end of the film – another desperate wink to the audience à la the zero-stars jibe. But the line isn’t so much funny as it is simply true. Some things are just better left buried.