The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D
Watching the new I Know What You Did Last Summer is a lot like getting your dick stuck in a car door; it is really painful and you’re not sure how you got here. I do have a lot of nostalgia for the original movie from 1997 (and if you didn’t know when it came out, this movie says “1997” about a thousand times). I saw it with a buddy of mine in a theater on opening day and we had a great time. It isn’t a top-shelf slasher movie. I would give it a B; it isn’t Halloween or Scream or anything. It is just an above-average slasher that is mostly remembered for the perfect, flawless, amazing performance of one Jennifer Love Hewittt. NEXT TO MY WIFE, Jennifer Love Hewittt in the late 90s/early 2000s is the most physically perfect woman that has ever existed in the history of humanity. Next to my wife. She reads these things. I love you, honey.
So what we have here is a requel, a sequel that is also basically a remake of the original. We have a group of young people (I think they are in their 20s here instead of teens) that accidentally kill someone, cover it up and then get stalked one year later by someone that knows what they did last summer.
Right off the bat, there is a big issue with the setup of this movie. In the original, it is a group of teens that hit a guy crossing a curving road in the middle of the night. One of the kids, the owner of the car, is drunk and spilling booze all over the car and the other three (sober) people. While I wouldn’t endorse throwing the body into the ocean in this scenario, I understand their thinking. They didn’t really do anything wrong, but the law wouldn’t see it that way. They would be screwed.
In the new version, fuck these people. They park their truck on the side of the road, which is called REAPER’S CURVE and doesn’t have a shoulder. Then they stand in the middle of the fucking road and, shockingly, a truck comes around the curve and swerves off the side of the mountain to avoid hitting them. I have no sympathy for these people. In the original, you can understand their thinking. It is wrong, but you can get why they did what they did. In this, they are just assholes.
The middle portion of the film then just plays out the same way as the original. Each character is modeled after a character in the original. They get notes just like in the original. They investigate things in a way that is just beat-by-beat the same as the original. The kills are fine, a couple being more graphic than I expected. For awhile, this was in the C-range for me as a generic slasher movie. It was fine.
But then we start getting into the legacy characters and revelations and I was fucking done with this. Before getting into spoilers, I will say that this movie goes out of its way to fuck up characters that I didn’t really care about to begin with (aside from the fact that Hewitt was molded by God as a gift to man). Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr.) are now bitterly divorced. Why? What happened? We followed these characters for two movies and Ray (like every other man) was in love with her. How do you take the core of the original movies and break them up off camera with no explanation? I am a kid of the 90s, goddamn it, these two should still be together! I want answers!
Aside from being the second most beautiful woman that has ever lived (after my wife), Hewitt really doesn’t even need to be in this movie. She is shoehorned into this and mostly just serves to provide cringe-inducing quotes from the original that no human would actually say in context. Amusingly, she also gives advice to our characters and says that the killer is likely someone that they know and it is personal. I guess she forgot that this isn’t Scream because this is the one slasher franchise where that actually isn’t applicable. She didn’t know the killer in the original movie; this is just nonsense for the trailer. There is no reason, other than her physical perfection, for her to be here. I think she’s hot, by the way.
Alright, now it is time for SPOILERS. SPOILERS, people. There will be SPOILERS. I can’t quite articulate the issues with this movie without SPOILERS because the last act is infuriating. There are two killers and the first, a girl named Stevie, is insultingly obvious. She is identified in her introduction as an outsider to the friend group (which has four people, like the original, without her), she is the one person with a motivation following the opening and she is still hanging around after the one-year gap when it seems like she would not be friends with these people. She might as well have “Killer” stamped on her head. Amusingly, she is a 120 pound girl, but somehow seems to transform into a grown man whenever she is dressed as the fisherman. Quite a superpower.
Oh, but then there is the second killer. Folks, the second killer is frigging Ray. Yes, Freddie Prinze Jr. Yeah. So, Stevie works as a bartender at Rays bar (which is the boat from the end of the original movie, one of the few nice touches in this) and she recruited Ray….I guess? So here is how this conversation must have gone:
Stevie: My friends and I accidentally killed someone. I’m pretty bummed.
Ray: Oh, well a few decades ago, my friends and I did something similar and we were hunted by a killer fisherman. Do you want to dress as fishermen and kill a bunch of people?
Stevie: I mean, I don’t see how that would help….
Ray: C’mon….
Stevie: You son of a bitch, I’m in.
Nothing about this makes any goddamn sense. Why is Ray killing these people? You would think that Ray would want to get back at Julie (for something?), but then he is annoyed when she gets involved. Why the fuck is he doing this if he didn’t even want her involved? There is a scene, before Ray is revealed as a killer, where he pretends to kill Stevie. At that moment, he has a gun and the remaining other characters are right there. Why does he shoot Stevie and pretend to not be an accomplice? They could have ended everything right there. He is pretending not to be a killer for the audience so that the final reveal can happen. It makes no fucking sense in the context of the narrative. This doesn’t make sense. None of this makes any fucking sense.
Out of respect for the effort that God put into crafting her, I would never give an F to a movie with Jennifer Love Hewitt. For the first hour or so, this was in the C-range. But then it crashed hard in the last act and I actually like this movie less and less as I think about it. The original I Know What You Did Last Summer isn’t a classic, but it deserves better than this pile of nonsense. Oh, but Jennifer Love Hewitt is still gorgeous. Goddamn.
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