With the successful reboot of “Scream” and the shockingly good “Final Destination: Bloodlines,” there’s a certain inevitability that permeates most of the 2025 version of “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” a project that’s content to bloodily check boxes instead of doing anything actually interesting. The 1997 box office smash was always a little clunky, but its simplicity grew somewhat refreshing over the last 28 years, especially as the horror genre shifted from the direct scares of the slasher flick to the “elevated” offerings of the A24 era. The thought of going back to basics with a modern version of the urban legend that spawned the original was understandably tempting, with even Mike Flanagan circling the idea around a decade ago. Sadly, ten years later, what has spurted out of the nostalgia machine that is the current Hollywood blockbuster system is an inert snore, a movie with a few memorable kills and reasonable performances, but one that’s, by and large, poorly paced and even more poorly written. History may have given the first film a reputation as dumb fun, but this one’s just dumb.
Chase Sui Wonders, so great on “The Studio” (and robbed of an Emmy nomination), is effective as Ava, one of five friends who do something morally questionable on the 4th of July in the small town of Southport. She’s with BFF Danica (Madelyn Cline), old crush Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), Danica’s fiancé Teddy (Tyriq Withers), and former friend Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon) on that night when Teddy is being an idiot in the street, forcing a car to swerve, crashing through a guard rail and to the rocks below. Yes, writers Sam Lansky & Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (who directs) don’t even really push our protagonists into the same murky waters as the original, which at least allowed one of the good guys to drive drunk into their victim. Yes, of course, Ava & company should have gone down to help the driver, and, yes, of course, they should have told the police about their role in what happened. But the watering down of their culpability is indicative of a film that lacks teeth.
Of course, a year later, the murder spree starts with a note that says, “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” Before you know it, people around the quintet of secret holders start getting sliced up by a fisherman with a hook, forcing Ava to find someone who has seen this all before: Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt). It turns out that Julie and Ray got married! And then split up in an ugly divorce! The breakup sent Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr) back to Southport, where he runs the local bar and complains about how the town’s power player (Billy Campbell) has papered over the town’s history to turn it into a mini-Hamptons.
Lansky & Robinson are clearly trying to say something about how people sweep horror under the rug on a scale much bigger than what Ava and her friends did that night, which is a very clever starting point—imagine an “I Know What You Did Last Summer” that’s about corruption and privilege instead of just idiocy. This one keeps feinting to that idea, mentioning class and power, but then getting distracted by something else. The movie raises the specter of true crime in the form of a podcast host of a show called “Live Laugh Slaughter,” but then takes that nowhere too. Julie’s trauma seems to be there just to give her character a defining trait, but the movie doesn’t have anything to say about it there either. It’s not a big deal for a slasher movie not to really delve into deep themes, but it’s frustrating to see one that moves in that direction and then almost seems afraid to go there. It’s a movie that’s constantly, almost aggressively, happy to stay put.
The overall shallowness of “I Know What You Did Last Summer” would be fine if it were just better made. In particular, the editing by Saira Haider is just off rhythm. It’s like a car in the wrong gear, going in the right direction, but something’s wrong with the speed. The kill scenes are particularly inconsistent as the first couple strike a tone of gory fun, but the back half of the film plays out like more serious fare. By the time a character is calling for his mother as he bleeds to death, the tonal balance is totally gone, shifting into disturbing in a truly unentertaining way. Even worse, the film’s pace never clicks in, as evidenced by its 111-minute runtime. Say what you will about the slasher genre resurgence that made the first movie a hit, those directors knew how to bring it in under 100.
As for performance, Wonders is good enough, and Withers has a bit of a future star air to him, but this ensemble seems unlikely to pop like the original, which really did catapult its leads to more work. Say what you will about the acting chops of Ryan Philippe and/or Sarah Michelle Gellar, there was a spark to the casting of the 1997 version that’s missing here, too.
There’s just so much missing, including logic. Without spoiling anything, the final twists of “I Know What You Did Last Summer” are somehow both kinda predictable and remarkably dumb. The truly horrendous “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer” ended with a pile-up of stupid twists, including the revelation that one of the main characters was the son of the murderous fisherman. This movie loves to use current viral phrases in a way that’s going to make it dated by the time the next reboot hits theaters, so I’ll do the same: It’s almost like the writers looked at the sequel that earned a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes and its illogical leaps and said, “Hold my beer.”
