Someone once said that I Know What You Did Last Summer walked so Scream could run — and that’s not exactly a lie. They were being worked on alongside one another by scribe Kevin Williamson, who went on to perfect his paranoid slasher formula with the Ghostface vehicle that became a classic of not just the genre but cinema in general, when it dropped in 1996 — one year before IKWYDLS. That being said, with writer-director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s reboot of the classic summer slasher, it feels as though Scream — the requel, that is — walked so I Know What You Did could run. The new I Know What You Did treads a similar trail to the original, of course, as all self-respecting reboots do. Years after the 1997 tragedy that slaughtered Helen Shivers and Barry Cox, a night of fireworks and fun goes wrong for a group of five best friends from Southport who become embroiled in an innocent death. A year after they make a pact to keep their involvement secret, they realize there’s no erasing the past when someone starts hunting them — someone who resembles the original 1997 murderer, slicker and hook and all. It’s all very “reboot,” very “rehash and do the same thing again for the nostalgia bait” — and the film even knows it at points, leaning into the bit with self-aware hilarity that delights even when it doesn’t entirely hit the mark. But there’s something in that; no, I Know What You Did isn’t the perfect reboot, but it feels more cohesive and engaging, and plays infinitely more fun and purposefully crafted than basically any of its requel contemporaries. It’s not afraid to stand on its strengths and put them in the forefront, and it’s even brave enough to make some big swings that don’t entirely land. But it’s hard not to fall for the movie that surrounds them, so it’s easy to give those things a pass and let yourself go along for the ride. |
