Review: 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' gets the legacy reboot/sequel it didn't deserve or need, but it could be a lot worse

The new legacy-sequel “I Know What You Did Last Summer” frequently falters, when director Jennifer Kaitlyn Robinson can’t seem to decide whether she’s rebooting the 1997 slasher movie or creating a continuation of it. 

But when it settles into the business at hand, of creatively slaughtering 20-somethings who may or may not have deserve it, it’s not half bad.

Robinson, who co-wrote with Sam Lansky and devised the story with Leah McKendrick, takes us back to Southport, the North Carolina seaside town where a killer in a fisherman’s raincoat killed several people with a giant hook. Some of those people are among the five young folks who tried to cover up a hit-and-run fatality in which they were involved. The new movie reminds everyone that two of those five survived the brutality: Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr.). 

Before we get to them this time, we start with five new friends: Best pals Danica (Madilyn Cline) and Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), Danica’s fiancé Teddy (Tyriq Withers), Ava’s high-school boyfriend Milo (Jonah Hauer-King) and Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon), their old high school friend from whom the others had grown distant. On the night of Danica and Teddy’s engagement party, the five go driving on a dangerous curve, where through a moment of immaturity, they accidentally cause a pickup truck and his driver to careen off the road and into the rocks below. 

Ava and Stevie want to call 911, or at least go down and try to save the driver. But Teddy — whose rich dad (Billy Williams) runs the town and apparently grew up thinking the mayor in “Jaws” was the hero — urges the others to keep quiet, so their lives don’t get ruined.

Flash-forward a year, and those five aren’t doing so hot. Danica is preparing for a wedding, but not to Teddy, who’s a despondent drunk living on his dad’s houseboat. Stevie’s managing a bar owned by Ray from the first movie, and has grown close to Danica. And Ava is punishing herself through sexual encounters with random strangers — like Tyler (Gabbriette Bechtel), whom Ava meets on the plane to Southport, which Tyler is visiting because she hosts a true-crime podcast and is fascinated by the 1997 killings.

At her bridal shower, Danica opens a card in which someone has written the fateful words: “I know what you did last summer.” And we’re off and running, with cast members being dispatched with a harpoon gun and the infamous giant hook.

Director Robinson has some fun staging the murders with a mix of ‘90s nostalgia and new-school creepiness, occasionally but not consistently landing some genuine scares. It’s fun to watch Wonders and Cline, running neck-and-neck for the title of the movie’s final girl, jump wholeheartedly into the franchise’s bloodshed. But Hewitt and Prinze, though they provide some of the movie’s strongest moments, also remind us that this franchise was never that good and we don’t need to take it that seriously, then or now.

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‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 18, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for bloody horror violence, language throughout, some sexual content and brief drug use. Running time: 111 minutes.