“So right here we’re, it’s 1997 over again,” one of many characters says tellingly in I Know What You Did Last Summer season. That line, in fact, is just not from the unique movie within the collection however relatively its same-titled “legacy sequel,” which, in the event you’re not conversant in Hollywood parlance, mainly means “Let’s see if we will squeeze extra {dollars} out of this sucker.” Slavishly paying homage to its predecessors, the movie additionally options so many Easter eggs that it primarily serves as canned nostalgia.
These throwbacks, satirically, are probably the most enjoyable side of this new installment, which is unlikely to garner the identical type of cult following because the 1997 unique. The idea stays the identical, with a gaggle of extraordinarily handsome younger individuals (right here of their mid-20s relatively than teen years) overlaying up a violent demise for which they have been accountable. Minimize to a 12 months later, when considered one of them receives a word containing the ominous titular message. Not lengthy after, a killer armed with a metallic hook and clad in a fisherman’s slicker and hat begins gruesomely killing them one after the other.
I Know What You Did Last Summer season
The Backside Line
Ought to have stayed buried.
Launch date: Friday, July 18
Forged: Madelyn Cline, Chase Sui Wonders, Jonah Hauer-King, Tyriq Withers, Sarah Pidgeon, Billy Campbell, Gabbriette Bechtel, Austin Nichols, Joshua Orpin, Freddie Prinze Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt
Director: Jennifer Kaytin Robinson
Screenwriters: Sam Lansky, Jennifer Kaytin Robinson
Rated R,
1 hour 51 minutes
On this model, they’re a reasonably bland group, consisting of Danica (Madelyn Cline) and her fiancé Teddy (Tyriq Withers); Ava (The Studio‘s Chase Sui Wonders), their pal who’s returned to have a good time their engagement; Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), with whom Ava has a romantic previous; and Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon), their estranged pal from the opposite facet of the tracks, who reunites with them for an ill-fated drive to look at fireworks from a stretch of freeway precisely named Reaper’s Curve.
None of them winds up being the primary sufferer of the stalking killer. That will be Wyatt (Joshua Orpin), Danica’s equally bland new fiancé, with whom she obtained concerned after breaking it off with Teddy. He didn’t have something to do with the incident that has spurred such violent revenge, however his demise serves the aim of setting the murderous occasions in movement whereas nonetheless leaving the central forged members in play.
Not receiving assist from the native police chief or the city’s chief actual property developer (Billy Campbell), who has a vested occupied with overlaying issues up, the group turns to 2 of the survivors of the earlier rampage that came about practically three a long time earlier. They’re Ray Bronson and Julie James (fan favorites Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jennifer Love Hewitt), who, for sure, are nonetheless scarred by their experiences. Julie, a minimum of, has made good use of her previous, changing into a professor who teaches her college students in regards to the nature of trauma.
For a lot of its working time, I Know What You Did Last Summer season tediously lurches from one violent slashing to a different, which might be effective if any of the kills showcased visible originality or real thrills, which they don’t. It’s not till the ultimate act that the movie goes significantly bonkers, throwing out so many purple herrings and plot twists revolving across the true id of the assassin that Agatha Christie would throw up her arms in disgust. It doesn’t assist that the extra entertainingly colourful supporting characters, together with a creepy pastor (Austin Nichols) and an attractive podcaster (Gabbriette Bechtel, very amusing) whose present known as “Reside, Giggle, Slaughter,” are sadly underutilized.
Thankfully, Prinze Jr. and Hewitt are available to supply some much-needed gravitas to the proceedings (which isn’t a sentence I ever envisioned writing). Each are in wonderful type, offering connective tissue to the unique movie and its sequel. They usually’re additionally good for some laughs, as when Ray, upon listening to one of many potential victims announce that they need to all merely flee the realm and head to the Bahamas in a ship, sagely advises: “For causes I received’t go into, I wouldn’t try this.”
Director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (Netflix’s Do Revenge) and her co-screenwriter Sam Lansky show clear affection for the franchise, as evidenced by some enjoyable cameos from unbilled performers whose appearances garnered delighted screams from the viewers (make sure you keep for the tip credit). However they haven’t succeeded in respiratory new life right into a drained franchise that, creatively talking, ought to have remained lifeless.
