A straightforward mishmash of the earlier I Know... movies, where the obvious silliness remains intact but the fun quotient comes discounted, observes Mayur Sanap.
Nobody watches teen horror/slasher flicks thinking they are a masterpiece. At best, these movies are passable entertainment with some guilty pleasure attached to them.
I went in for I Know What You Did Last Summer expecting the same mindless fun of the 1997 original, which was introduced to Hindi audiences back in 2003 with Anurag Basu's unofficial remake Kucch To Hai, starring Tusshar Kapoor and Esha Deol.
The expectation was in check, given the not-so-great reputation of these movies, but the recent revival of titles like Final Destination, Scream and Halloween showed that a fresh makeover is possible to energise these old franchises.
Turns out, this latest reboot version of the I Know... movies is just a nostalgia bait that somehow dumbs down on everything thats entertaining about the franchise, including OG stars Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddy Prinze Jr, who are wasted in ludicrous cameos.
The same old plot is trotted out yet again.
A group of adults -- who are indistinguishable from each other because of their uniformly annoying personalities -- gets entangled in an accidental death.
They make a covenant to keep their secret.
Exactly a year after the incident, a mysterious figure with a hook appears who *surprise surprise* knows what they did last summer, and begins killing the group members one by one.
The story is a straightforward mishmash of the earlier I Know... movies where the obvious silliness remains intact but the fun quotient comes discounted.
The situations are predictable, the deaths are unimaginative, the characters are flat, and the acting is bad.
The whodunit aspect keeps you hooked with some mindless bloodshed that occurs at regular intervals.
Writer-Director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (whose writing credits include Thor: Love and Thunder) and her writing partner Sam Lansky resort to genre clichés without bringing any fresh ideas.
There is really no suspense or tension built-up, it's just attractive-looking characters running around, screaming, and saying, 'Please don't kill me' only to be killed the next moment.
Given how little you are invested in them, it doesn't matter if these characters lived or died.
One could forgive most shortcomings if the conclusion was at least effective. But the final twist is so absurd, so unintentionally hilarious that it would make an Abbas-Mustan flick look superior in comparison.
After all that tiresome play, there comes the inevitable to-be-continued ending, which would make even the franchise loyalists roll their eyes.
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