Jonah Naplan   July 17, 2025

There’s a new set of characters but all of the same plot beats in “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” a loose remake of a 1997 cult classic that, even at its time, felt like an inferior rehash of popular slasher movies. Like so many other legacyquels of this era, the film is a lazarus-styled nostalgic tribute that allows the stars of the original to “pass the torch” on to the next generation of heroes who will carry the franchise on their backs for the next few years; that is, if this attempt at resurrecting a classic IP from the dead is a financial success. There’s very little new sprinkled anywhere throughout “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” which is essentially just a cinematic excuse for this series, which neglected to go all the way into the gore in its first outing, to flex its R-rating, and invent a few kills that are only intriguing for a good couple seconds. These characters may have kept a big secret for a year, but you’ll surely forget about this movie in a week.

The killer in this franchise is known as the Fisherman, who wields a menacing hook and always holds some sort of personal vendetta against the group of young protagonists. This 2025 version focuses on a new set of characters who all feel like less interesting versions of ones from the original. Chase Sui Wonders delivers far and away the best performance of the bunch as Ava, the centerpiece of the movie, who, with her best friends, Danica (Madelyn Cline), Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), Teddy (Tyriq Withers), and Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon), accidentally killed a man last Fourth of July when Teddy was fooling around in the middle of the road, causing a car to swerve off a cliff. Right off the bat, the morality issues surrounding the tragedy feel significantly less severe (in the 1997 movie, the friends themselves were recklessly driving, and they hit a man standing in the road, an obvious homicide), making for a largely weightless film with diminished stakes. A year after the incident, at Danica’s bridal shower, she receives an anonymous card with only the cryptic words “I know what you did last summer” scribbled inside, reuniting the estranged friends who promised to never speak of that night ever again.

In classic slasher movie fashion, what follows is a series of increasingly dumb decisions on the part of the characters who’d be labored copies of the victims in the “Scream” franchise if not for their lack of intelligence. Director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, who cowrote the script with Sam Lansky, tries to embed all the action with hidden messages about corruption, censorship, and even identity, but fails so spectacularly that you’re laughing at the movie instead of with it. The most annoying aspect of Robinson’s reimagining of this story is the abundance of pop culture references that ground these characters as products of the current era but will age this movie like milk as time goes by.

This is one of those pandering “Gen Z” movies that seems to be under the reductive assumption that the audience is stupid and it must hold their hands and explain everything that’s going on through dialogue. Large sections of “I Know What You Did Last Summer” feature characters standing around talking just long enough for us to start getting angsty about when the action will resume. The stabbings in this movie are certainly nothing to write home about anyway, aside from the occasional flicker of creativity that will have you wondering what “I Know What You Did Last Summer” could have been if it didn’t feel like a studio’s desperate attempt to make a big buck by banking on a dated IP because they can’t think of anything else to do.

The script feels like it was spat out by an artificial intelligence program that was fed the first movie and its abhorrent sequel “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer” and was asked to fuse the two through a modern lens. As a result, the film features not one but two of the original cast members who are ushered into the plot to provide guidance to the young protagonists because they’ve “been through this before.” Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. reprise their roles as Julie James and Ray Bronson, respectively, and neither of them look like they want to be there. Prinze Jr. is especially bad as a character retconned so severely that he’s basically unrecognizable.

When everything starts to get revealed in a narratively clumsy fashion (at 111 minutes, this movie takes a long time to start pointing fingers), the random twists feel like the writers had no idea where to turn, while the killers’ motives are illogical. A movie this dumb should at least have the sense to be self-aware, but “I Know What You Did Last Summer” so desperately wants us to take it seriously, especially in the third act, which is mean-spirited in a near-offensive way. A final face-off on a yacht lacks the teeth that the original film’s climactic smack-down in a similar setting had.

The movie ends with a series of moments and a mid-credits scene that suggests even more is to come from a franchise that really should never have been touched again in the first place. It leaves me to wonder: will this series just keep copying itself over and over until we get a remake of this film a decade down the road, hypothetically giving us three different movies titled “I Know What You Did Last Summer”? I know that last summer another second-tier slasher franchise attempted this same copy-cat trick with the abysmal “The Strangers: Chapter 1” (and two more are on the way!), and I know that this summer you shouldn’t spend your money on this movie, either.

Now playing in theaters.