Directed By Jennifer Kaytin Robinson

Starring – Madelyn Cline, Jennifer Love-Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr

The Plot – When five friends inadvertently cause a deadly car accident, they cover up their involvement and make a pact to keep it a secret rather than face the consequences. A year later, their past comes back to haunt them and they’re forced to confront a horrifying truth: someone knows what they did last summer…and is hell-bent on revenge. As one by one the friends are stalked by a killer, they discover this has happened before, and they turn to two survivors (Love-Hewitt, Prinze Jr) of the legendary Southport Massacre of 1997 for help.

Rated R for bloody horror violence, adult language throughout, some sexual content and brief drug use

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER – Official Trailer (HD)

POSITIVES

Regardless of how I feel about this legacy sequel, it’s undoubtedly the most beautiful looking installment of the entire franchise, with an updated and modernistic approach to the cinematography that effortfully elicits a believably evolved updating for Southport that feels enriched with believability. Part of the only charm within the confines of the screenplay is in revisiting some of these vital moments in gushing nostalgia for the original movie that enacts a continuity in the franchise that feels very present in the foreground of the movie’s exploration, and with breathlessly beautiful establishing shots of the sea combined with iconography in the framing of the slasher, the film’s visuals attains notoriety where the thematic explorations fail on nearly every discernable measurement, inspiring credibility and emphasis into the genetics of its predecessors that, with the many Easter eggs deposited casually throughout the movie’s set decoration, does prove Robinson’s appreciation not only for where the movie came from, but also where it’s going. Another thing the script does actually better than its predecessors is to establish why this killer is going after people who have nothing to do with the manslaughter at the forefront of the movie’s prologue, which makes sense from something as effortlessly easy as a single line of dialogue, allowing the movie to maximize its potential towards the biggest body count of the entire series, which keeps the stakes firmly in the mind of the movie’s audience. Lastly, while the performances are admittedly a mixed bag, the inclusion and return of Jennifer Love-Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr inspire a palpable energy and momentum in the movie’s favor that allows each of them to step back seamlessly into their respective roles, with a battle-tested confrontational dynamic between them that I shamelessly indulged in. Not only are the reasons justified and meaningful for how they’re worked back into the film, but their on-screen chemistry towards one another feels enhanced by believability that feels every bit lived-in with experience as it does awkward with their previous distance, and if I’m being honest, I invested in them more with their couple of scenes than I did with the main cast’s allowance of 106 minutes of the movie’s runtime, making me wish this was a direct sequel rather a hybrid alongside of a remake that it turned out to be.

NEGATIVES

If Scream 5 told us that horror franchises could feel new again, “I Know What You Did Last Summer” drops those ambitions directly in a ten foot deep grave, with a horribly written and questionably executed installment that occasionally feels like a fever dream of fanfiction that is laughable for the most demeaning kinds of reasons. Considering Robinson has only directed teenage comedies to this point, there’s imbalance to the atmosphere and material that directly contradicts themselves with some of the most abruptly jarring tonal shifts, featuring underlining immature humor that abolishes any semblance of tension or suspense that this movie might even accidentally earn, while feeling like the worst kind of Netflix romp that alienates adult audiences from the word go. The script features the kind of tell all dialogue that forcefully outlines everything about the backstories of these characters that you would ever need to know about them, but beyond that saddles their personalities with blandness for a bunch of snobbishly selfish characters that I would never spend ten minutes with in my real life, let alone nearly two hours with for a feature length presentation. Part of the problem with their respective outlines is that they all feel like parodies of the characters from the 1997 movie, without any semblance of redeeming quality or emotional depth in their performances or evolutionary arcs that allows them to stand out from preconceived expectations, but even if they were the most compelling ensemble ever put to pad and paper, the storytelling surrounding their efforts continuously strands their minimized efforts with plot contrivances and conveniences that we’re never able to meet them at eye level with any kind of legitimate logic, taking realism and even coherence out of the equation for a movie that shouldn’t require this much thinking to discern. While lazy writing has always been a trait of uninspiring slasher movies, the efforts here elicit characters carrying on as usual with their daily routines despite a blood thirsty killer casually stacking bodies around them, with the set-up to this movie’s mystery feeling as obvious as flatulence after chili, especially considering there are only so few characters involved with the vicious secret between them. When I say I figured out the killer in the movie’s opening five minutes, I’m not embellishing slightly, as the script’s aforementioned exposition machine goes out of its way to paint discourse to one particular character that stands out like a sore thumb, and though the killer’s identity is merely one aspect of a reveal that grows convolutedly frustrating by movie’s end, featuring a twist that audibly made me yell “Fuck You” at the screen, it underwhelms at the most engaging aspect to a slasher movie’s genetics, with a motivation for the character involved that I didn’t buy nor feel fully realized within. On the subject of the killer, the violence and gore are given ample wiggle room with an embellishing R-rating that should inspire the production to step up the vitriolic essence of this new killer, but they’re nothing special with regards to the underlining urgency or vulnerabilities of the direction, as well as the artificial special effects in carnage candy, with only one meaningful death that feels like it pushed the envelope of technical capabilities and creativity, and everything else feeling like reheated service from 1997 that doesn’t go down any easier nearly thirty years after its expiration date. The C.G blood deposits stand out with three-dimensional detectability in their obviousness in everything from coloring to texture, and the editing goes directly out of its way to avoid depiction towards the penetrating efforts of the killer, so we’re left with a far more watered down feeling sequel that might up the body count, but refuses to up the ante with regards to any kind of satisfying pay-offs, and with the climax cornered by Netflix brand greenscreen aboard a boat sequence at sea, proves far more of a distracting emphasis that constantly took me out of the heat of the engagement, conjuring the worst side of modernistic approach to the production that served as the only times I laughed throughout the film’s duration. Finally, the film audaciously caters for a sequel in a mid credits sequence with one more big reveal to its creativity, and while a certain cameo from one character involved was a pleasantry, the reasoning for their summoning and atmospheric rendering of the sequence made me cringe in the worst kind of way, all the while conveying that resolution from this installment wasn’t fully realized as we might think. This sequence not only makes the film’s climax feel so superfluously undervalued, but it articulates the tediousness in trying to incorporate every aspect of the series’ world-building that began to feel like nostalgia berries of sorts for the audience, wasting away what could’ve been a therapeutic means of clarity for the soul survivors, all in the means of chauffeuring for a sequel that I’m confident after this movie we will never receive

OVERALL
“I Know What You Did Last Summer” might’ve been a legacy sequel that nobody was asking for, but it’s made all the more frivolous with tonal misfiring and underwritten material that can’t even measure up to a mediocre predecessor, leaving it lapsed by the expectations that it never comes close to attaining. While revisiting some of the series most notable characters does carry with it some nostalgic nourishment that longtime fans of the franchise will inevitably indulge in, the reheated leftovers of this mystery and uninteresting characters can’t find any way of hooking audiences towards its newest chapter, making the events of this summer pale in comparison to the events of the last, where we weren’t burdened by another legacy sequel attempting to reignite what’s dead and buried

My Grade: 4.1 or D-