I know what movie studios do every summer: trot out follow-ups, remakes, and reboots whose sole impetus is extending the box-office life of a popular intellectual property. Hence the arrival of I Know What You Did Last Summer (July 18, in theaters), a legacy sequel that, like 2022’s Scream, is a franchise continuation that refuses to devise a new title that might distinguish it from the original.
Fortunately, such laziness doesn’t extend to the rest of Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s film, which marries serious whodunit thrills and self-referential jokiness—a have-it-both-ways approach epitomized by Jennifer Love Hewitt’s old-school heroine Julie stating, “Nostalgia’s overrated” right before she asks her signature question, “What are you waiting for?!” The answer, it turns out, is this surprisingly sturdy summer slasher retread.
It’s been nearly three decades since the tragic summer of 1997, when Julie and her pals were hunted by the man they believed they’d killed, and that ugly history has been scrubbed from the Internet (and the public consciousness) by real-estate tycoon Gary (Billy Campbell), who’s transformed the North Carolina fishing town of Southport into a ritzy enclave.
Of its many well-off residents, I Know What You Did Last Summer concentrates on a group of friends celebrating the engagement of Danica (Madelyn Cline) to Gary’s son Teddy (Tyriq Withers). During the course of that lavish shindig, Ava (The Studio’s Chase Sui Wonders) and Milo (Jonah Hauer-King) share mild sparks, and the foursome invite Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon)—who lost touch with the gang after suffering personal misfortune which prevented her from attending college—to join them on a drive to watch July 4 fireworks at their favorite spot: the winding road that overlooks the ocean and was the site of Julie’s ‘97 misfortune.
Unfortunately for these pretty people, lightning strikes twice when Teddy inadvertently causes a truck to skid off the cliff. Though Ava tries to persuade everyone to see if the driver is dead, Teddy calls his dad to clean up this mess and then deceptively convinces everyone to leave. A year later, Teddy is a drunk living on a family boat, Danica is about to marry new beau Wyatt (Joshua Orpin), and Milo is estranged from Ava, who shows up in town after a plane ride that culminated with airport bathroom sex with podcaster Tyler, who’s visiting to record a show about the infamous ’97 massacre.
At her bridal shower, Danica receives an anonymous card with the series’ fateful message (“I Know What You Did Last Summer”). Shortly thereafter, corpses begin piling up, all of them the handiwork of an enigmatic fiend who wears the very same slicker, and wields the same fishing hook, that Julie’s stalker did years earlier.
From a visual, narrative, and tonal standpoint, I Know What You Did Last Summer (co-written by Sam Lansky) follows its predecessors’ lead, except that it adds a welcome measure of knowing humor.
Whether it’s Danica talking about doing her daily beauty routine in the aftermath of a homicide, Taylor sporting a t-shirt featuring Julie’s slain BFF Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar), or Teddy suggesting that the crew deal with this calamitous situation by fleeing to the Bahamas (an amusing reference to 1998’s I Still Know What You Did Last Summer’s island-set mayhem), the film consistently winks at its audience while simultaneously playing its terror straight. The fact that it does the latter reasonably well earns it the right to indulge in the former.
To a greater extent than its ancestors, Robinson’s film is a guessing game full of suspects, including creepy Pastor Judah (Austin Nichols) and, well, Julie and her old flame Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr.), who’s segued from working on fishing boats to running a marina bar that employs Stevie. Since Ava and company aren’t clueless about Southport’s gnarly past, they soon seek out these two veterans for advice on how best to deal with a maniac with a fetish for ominous notes and brutal slayings.
The director, however, uses her established franchise stars judiciously in order to keep the focus on Ava and her shrinking clique’s efforts to get to the bottom of this insanity before they’re stabbed, sliced, impaled, harpoon-gunned, or strung up like the catch of the day.
Wonders’ Ava is an adequate protagonist whose sexual tastes (she has a thing for being choked and punished) are signs that she’s a whole lot like Julie, who admits that trauma changes a person in mysterious ways. Hewitt mainly looks shaken as the all-grown-up final girl, and her hostility with Prinze Jr.’s Ray amplifies the sense that everyone is a bit unhinged and, thus, potentially capable of cosplaying as the Fisherman.
Unfortunately, I Know What You Did Last Summer can’t maintain suspense to the finish line, wrapping things up with a boat showdown whose surprises are deflatingly pedestrian; after a solid build-up, the material opts for the most obvious conclusion, all while leaving the door open for additional chapters. No matter that its best characters remain breathing, those table-setting gestures are handled rather awkwardly.
Still, significant chunks of I Know What You Did Last Summer hit the modern slasher-cinema sweet spot, highlighted by a sequence—in which Milo goes to his car at night to retrieve a phone charger—that’s marked by Robinson cunningly orchestrating back-to-back jolt-scare fake-outs. Moments such as those make the standard tropes easy to digest, and they certainly compensate for the usual grab bag of references to previous series entries and cameos from familiar faces, one of which arrives courtesy of a cheeky dream sequence (after all, most of Julie’s cohorts are dead!), and another which appears in a fan service-y mid-credits scene.
There’s nothing particularly novel about the film’s blending of then and now, although mercifully, it doesn’t get as smugly meta as the recent Scream installments, opting to perform its copycat moves with playful reverence.
Racing hurriedly through its third act, I Know What You Did Last Summer does little that hasn’t been seen before. Nonetheless, if genre fans will always know what it’s up to, that’s just another way it pays faithful homage to its by-the-numbers precursors.
