If you make an I Know What You Did Last Summer movie, one thing has to work above all else. Whatever the characters “did last summer” has to be bad enough for someone to plausibly return a year later and try to kill them. It’s one of the things the 1997 original gets right. A group of (mostly) drunk friends drive on a dark road, run into a person, and then, while he may or may not be still alive, throw his body into the ocean. Yeah, if I was hit by a bunch of drunk kids and left for dead, I’d feel pretty murderous too.
The sequel, which opens in theaters this weekend, doesn’t even get that right. It thinks it does, crafting a scenario that is similar to the one in the original film, but when you break it down, the lack of clearly defined right and wrong undercuts the whole rest of the movie. You never feel like what they “did last summer” is bad enough to warrant that level of revenge, and as a result, the whole movie falls flat. So what happens? Here it is, with spoilers for only the first 15 minutes of the movie.
A group of friends leaves a party to go to a secret spot to watch fireworks. Most of them are drinking and smoking weed, but Danica (Madelyn Cline) is not. She’s sober, so she makes it a point that she’ll be driving. Safety first!
On the way, her friends, but especially her fiancé, Teddy (Tyriq Withers) are pretty messed up. He tries to jokingly distract her (and distracted driving is what caused the accident in the first movie), but eventually, they make it to the fireworks spot no problem. Once they get there, Teddy is feeling so good, he starts dancing in the street. While in the middle of the street, a car starts to approach, and Teddy decides to play chicken with it. It gets close enough that Milo (Jonah Hauer-King) has to save him, and everyone gets mad at Teddy’s recklessness. This is important because it establishes there’s a good amount of road between the turn and where Teddy is standing.
Soon after this, everything goes down. Teddy is still in the road, and a car comes by that’s going so incredibly fast its driver somehow doesn’t see him. As the car swerves to avoid Teddy, it ends up crashing into a guardrail and almost goes over a cliff. With the car teetering on the ledge, the group all rush over to save the driver, but the doors are jammed. They do everything they can, but five kids can’t pull a pickup truck back from over a cliff, and it eventually goes over. But not before the driver gains consciousness, smashes the window, and rips Teddy’s shirt off. This never comes back, by the way, but it’s a thing that happens.
Now, should Teddy have been in the road? Of course not. But should this person have been driving at a reasonable enough speed to see him, especially when the film establishes there’s plenty of road there? For sure. So, basically, the movie misses the mark a few times here. First, the movie makes it clear that a sober person is driving, and they arrive at the location unscathed. Second, Teddy is partially, but not wholly, at fault for the accident, and everyone makes a clearly valiant attempt to save the driver. Next, Teddy calls the police to report the accident, but then they all leave as if they weren’t there.
Now, not everyone is happy about this. They feel they should stay there and own up to it, but the idea is floated that, as a compromise, they’ll go to the police station on the way home. Which doesn’t happen and further pisses off the group. It’s an awkward ride home, but eventually, they all agree never to speak of this again.
To reiterate, Teddy reports the accident to the police. This is after he and others tried to save the person. They don’t handle the situation perfectly by any means, but the movie makes them much more forgivable than the group in the original. Oh, and the car doesn’t explode or anything when it falls over the cliff. It’s just there. (Later, we learn the person did die.) Either way, the characters don’t do everything right, but they do enough things right that you at least feel like they are partially not responsible. So, by the next year, when Danica gets that titular note (only she gets the note, by the way, so it’s not really even a thing), instead of “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” it’s really more like “I Know You Made a Guy Swerve Off a Cliff by Accident Last Summer.”
Later in the film, we learn some spoilers about who the victim was and how they relate to the killer, which I won’t ruin here. It does make the plausibility of why this person goes on a murderous rampage maybe 5% more believable, but even so, after 90 minutes of movie where we’re left wondering why this killer is so mad, it’s too little too late. And that’s the new I Know What You Did Last Summer in a nutshell. A legacy sequel to a movie that was already pretty bad on its own but somehow doesn’t even understand why that movie worked in the first place.
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