Movie review: ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ slashes nostalgia balancing act

Nostalgia is overrated snarls Julie James Jennifer Love Hewitt at a crucial moment in I Know What You Did Last Summer Jennifer Kaytin Robinson s sequel remake legasequel of the teen horror classic Poor traumatized Julie has spent years leaving her past behind only to be dragged back into it The report also feels like Robinson s spiciest take on the proliferation of legasequels Sure she s remaking a s classic but she s not going to serve it up reverently In fact her twists on the material might anger a whole lot of fans which is at least a different approach to majority of of these projects But nostalgia is also the necessary evil for tempting those fans to the theater Can the new I Know What You Did Last Summer have it both avenues Not quite The inherent tension at the core of this new film is in the battle of old versus new and ultimately old wins out While Robinson and co-writers Leah McKendrick and Sam Lansky update the material their script is rife with too a multitude of underbaked ideas to cohere into anything resonant revealing that the elegant simplicity of the first film four teens one bad mistake a spooky seaside town and an urban legend was the key to its success Back in I Know What You Did Last Summer was regarded as the silly younger sibling to the sharper smarter Scream Both were written by Kevin Williamson the official bard of witty teen dialogue e g Dawson s Creek Summer wasn t as savvy and self-aware as the groundbreaking slasher Scream but it was deeply sincere especially in Hewitt s wounded bird performance and a scant expertly rendered suspense sequences became instant classics like the demise of Sarah Michelle Gellar s beauty queen Helen Shivers If you re unfamiliar with the premise of I Know What You Did Last Summer the story follows a group of young friends who cause an accidental death on the Fourth of July while out driving recklessly A year later they start receiving anonymous notes from someone claiming to know what they did and are subsequently stalked and slashed by a killer in a rain slicker wielding a large hook In the new version the characters are older young professionals in their early s not high school seniors and so the terrible accident has to be adjusted in order to match the audience s credulity Unfortunately that means its power is also weakened what happens doesn t quite match the level of guilt they feel and the vengeance that s meted out All this for that The Julie stand-in is Ava Chase Sui Wonders and her beauty queen bestie is Danica Madelyn Cline Ava s high school boyfriend is the utterly dull DC politico Milo Jonah Hauer-King and Danica s rich playboy ex Teddy Tyriq Withers is their town s golden boy the son of wealthy real estate developer Grant Spencer Billy Campbell A fifth friend Stevie Sarah Pidgeon is added to the mix in the last few days sober and trying to get her life back on track when it all gets derailed by their rabble-rousing The accident the reunion the guy with a hook it all proceeds apace with a scarce extra layers The bloody town lore has been covered up by Grant in order to turn Southport into the Hamptons of the South a bit of gentrifislaytion as coined by true-crime podcaster Tyler Gabbriette Bechtel She s in town to unearth the facts of the massacre for an episode and gets far more than she bargained for As her friends start dropping Ava turns to Julie now a psychology professor and Ray Freddie Prinze Jr the owner of a dockside bar and Stevie s boss Writers Robinson Lansky and McKendrick bring up all these fresh ideas is the killer trying to drive down rent in Southport What of the true crime podcast boom What is the significance of Danica s woo-woo spirituality and then just let them hang loose threads in the wind All we have to cling to is our original pals Julie and Ray whose stories are far more compelling than any of these newbies whose relationships seem forced and tenuous at best Talented cinematographer Elisha Christian references a few of the look and feel of the original film but doesn t capture the haunted nautical vibe that made it so atmospheric and surprisingly stylish There s snap and wit to the friends patter and Cline and Withers have a palpable chemistry but everything else feels weightless it doesn t land Then there s a twist and reveal that becomes a canonical betrayal absolutely unsupported by coherent motivation and the whole gambit falls apart The new I Know What You Did Last Summer might thumb its nose at nostalgia but the challenge is that the nostalgic bits are the only parts of this worth watching Related Articles Discovery Shark Week has breaching great whites looks back at Jaws and starts with several dancing Stephen Colbert s Late Show is canceled by CBS and will end in May MPR says rescission bill will dismantle the inhabitants media system as we know it Eddington review Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal once upon an early COVID time in the West Hulu series names new person of interest in Jodi Huisentruit scenario I Know What You Did Last Summer stars out of MPA rating R for bloody horror violence language throughout various sexual content and brief drug use Running time How to watch In theaters July