‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ Review: Drowning in Nostalgia and Bone-Dry on Scares

It seems no one’s ready to let sleeping fisherman lie. The latest iteration of I Know What You Did Last Summer hauls its soggy legacy back onto the deck once again, this time posing as both a reboot and a sequel. But when Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr.) mutters, “There’s a lot of similarities to 1997,” he isn’t lying. Not only does the film lift plot points wholesale from its predecessor, it also recycles its tone, characters, and sense of dramatic urgency and not in a clever or nostalgic way, but in the sense that very little here feels fresh. The movie clings so tightly to its roots that it forgets to grow any of its own.

With a cast made up of trendy Gen Z faces and returning icons from the original, the film’s idea of reinvention is mostly skin-deep. You’ve got Madelyn Cline doing her best as a scream queen, Chase Sui Wonders playing it cool, and yes, Prinze and Jennifer Love Hewitt back in the mix. The plot? A group of young adults bury a deadly secret and, shocker, someone starts picking them off. We’ve seen this movie before. Hell, we’ve seen this specific franchise before, and the new entry does little more than rearrange the furniture.

Director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, who also co-wrote the script with Sam Lansky, seems desperate to anchor the movie to the 1997 original, so much so that nearly every twist and turn is weighed down by callbacks. But rather than build a mystery you care about, it seems fixated on stitching every loose thread into the lore of the original. You’d think 28 years of distance might offer some perspective. Instead, we’re stuck with narrative decisions that reek more of obligation than inspiration.

Prinze Jr., with his salt-and-pepper gravitas, does what he can with the role of Ray, now a bar-owning local legend still haunted by that fateful summer. Hewitt’s Julie James is now a trauma scholar, because of course she is. Their presence adds a touch of legacy charm, but even these callbacks are only mildly effective. They’re not cameos, but they feel like placeholders, like the film needed them there to justify its existence.

There are flickers of fun, mostly from Madelyn Cline, who at least tries to give the film some edge. Her bloodbath bath bomb scene is memorable, and there’s a surreal dream scene moment that feels like it wandered in from a different—and better—movie. These glimpses of style and self-awareness are rare, though, and the film would’ve benefitted from more of them. Instead, it settles for a mostly humorless mood, as if being mildly grim will disguise how hollow it is. One scene even forces Julie James (Hewitt) to explain trauma as if reading from a pop-psychology Tumblr post. If this is satire, it’s toothless. If it’s sincerity, it’s worse.

I Know What You Did Last Summer is a middling horror flick caught in the headlights of its own nostalgia.

Even the kills feel perfunctory. For a film rated R, it’s shockingly tame. You get the classic hook-wielding killer, shadows galore, and a few setups for gore, but they lack bite, not once did I so much as flinch. Robinson prefers restraint, which could have been stylish had it not dulled what little suspense the film manages to muster. This is a whodunit masquerading as a slasher, but without much heat from either side of the mask.

Everything feels half-hearted, borrowing liberally from Scream without any of that series’ verve. It gestures vaguely at deeper themes, gentrification, privilege, the weight of the past but never develops them beyond surface-level setups. A few lines of dialogue nod toward meaning, but they vanish into a sea of shrugs and scattered plotting. Even the murderer’s identity, when revealed, barely registers.

By the final act, the camera is spinning, and the story is desperately pulling at every lingering thread from 1997’s better-but-not-great forebear. It’s a middling horror flick caught in the headlights of its own nostalgia. To quote Ray again: yeah, it’s a lot like 1997, the only problem is, it’s even less fun the second time around. If you’re hoping for thrills, chills, or genuine reinvention, this hook never catches.

I Know What You Did Last Summer is now playing in cinemas worldwide.

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