A group of friends cover up a fatal accident, only to find themselves menaced by a mysterious killer a year later.
Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Jennifer Kaytin Robinson
Starring: Madelyn Cline, Chase Sui Wonders, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr, Jonah Hauer-King, Tyriq Withers, Sarah Pidgeon, Billy Campbell
I Know What You Did Last Summer is the latest belated horror sequel to annoyingly adopt its predecessor's title. You might argue that with the titles I Still Know What You Did Last Summer and I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer having already been taken by sequels, this fourth instalment had run out of options. But it's still bloody annoying. You tell someone your favourite movie is Halloween, and they're like "Really? That bad slasher movie from 2018?" or worse, "I presume you mean the 2007 original?". I guess the studio suits worry that younger viewers won't have seen the original movies, but if this is the case why bring back the original characters? If you aren't aware that this IKWYDLS is the third sequel to a movie from 1997 you'll be pretty confused when Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr show up.
The focus however isn't on the olds but on a new group of youngsters who roughly match the dynamic of their predecessors. There's the sensitive final girl Ava (Chase Sui Wonders); her shy romantic interest Milo (Jonah Hauer-King); prom queen Danica (Madelyn Cline) and her jock fiancé Teddy (Tyriq Withers); and Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon), whose working class background makes her feel like an outsider among this group of rich kids.
All five decide to watch a Fourth of July fireworks display in the dumbest spot imaginable, the very same cliffside road where this whole franchise began with an infamous hit and run. To its credit, IKWYDLS2025 has some fun playing with our expectations in this early scene, teasing various possibilities and finding a novel way to give the protagonists something to cover up without directly aping the original. The trouble is, unlike the vehicular manslaughter of the original, the "crime" committed here is far less serious and easily open to plausible deniability, making it less believable that these kids wouldn't go to the cops, who all seem to be in the pocket of Teddy's property developer father.
But perhaps the biggest issue with this sequel is how its young protagonists don't seem to have an ounce of guilt regarding their inaction on that fateful night. Not even Ava, who is the surrogate for Hewitt's Julie James. When they reunite a year later they're all smiles until someone receives a handwritten note baring the movie's titular threat. The original was no classic, but Hewitt, Prinze Jr, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Philippe all convinced us that they had spent the past year living in a constant state of guilt. That movie also dared to give us protagonists who weren't easy to like, whereas this sequel is too eager to have us empathise with its leads.
While Prinze Jr's Ray serves some purpose to the plot here, Hewitt's Julie is shoehorned in chiefly to deliver some exposition and a literal lecture on "trauma" (like Laurie Strode in Halloween: H20, the best of the '90s slashers, Julie is now a teacher who likes to neck wine while correcting papers). Gellar's cameo is even more nonsensical, as her Helen appears in a dream sequence as a fortysomething Gellar, which is weird as the character never made it past her teens.
This sequel departs from the original with a higher body count, the killer now seemingly targeting half the coastal town of Southport rather than just the protagonists. In fact it seems as if the central quintet are in no more danger than anyone else in their town. The movie makes the grave mistake of killing off its most interesting character, a feisty lesbian true crime podcaster (Gabbriette Bechtel) who could have been this movie's Gale Weathers; she's far more charismatic than any of the skinjobs we're supposed to root for here.
At times we find ourselves wondering if elements of earlier drafts made their way clumsily into this finished version. The opening scene makes a big deal of Ava having a dead mother, but it's never brought up again. Similarly, Stevie has a dead father, and has been effectively adopted by Ray - wouldn't it have made more sense to simply make her Ray's actual daughter?
The villain in a fisherman's black slicker, with their dual harpoon and hook weapons, still makes for an imposing image, but the kills here are unimaginative and the film sorely lacks the sort of stalking sequences necessary to generate suspense from this setup. In a final insult, a piece of ADR is deployed to keep things open for a sequel, along with a mid-credits scene that reintroduces another character from the franchise. It seems someone still knows what these kids did last summer, but will anyone still care by next summer?
I Know What You Did Last Summer is in UK/ROI cinemas from July 18th.
