I Know What You Did Last Summer is more than the sum of its parts. The parts are… not much.
I mean that with affection. I like this movie. I have a fondness for it that survives every objection I can throw at it, and there are plenty. The dialogue is weird. Not heightened-weird. Not Kevin Williamson doing the thing he does better in Scream. Weird like somebody trained an AI on 1990s teen thrillers before AI existed and asked it to write kids with secrets, guilt, cheekbones, and a fishing-town economy. People keep saying things that sound almost human. The movie keeps making choices that feel almost motivated. And then Jennifer Love Hewitt walks into the street and screams at God, or the Fisherman, or the contest winner who apparently directed the scene, and the whole thing becomes Scorsese-cinema on a lark. Where the F did all the crabs go??
I kind of love it.
The setup. Four pretty kids hit a man on a coastal road, panic, talk themselves into hiding the body, and then discover too late that they did not merely cover up an accident. They committed a murder.
The first impact is bad luck and privilege and stupidity. The dock is a choice. The movie needs you to get back on board with them after that. It helps that the cast is absurdly good-looking and competent enough to sell the panic. It helps more that Ryan Phillippe starts at a 10 and then decides, “hell, I guess I live here now.”
The morality is a mess. The kids are punished for the cover-up, sure, but they are also punished for being pretty and rich-ish and college-bound and careless. My God do we ever love to punish teenagers for having futures.
Johnny Galecki and Sarah Michelle Gellar’s sister get fed into the machinery mostly because the movie needs more suspicious people and then immediately needs fewer suspicious people. There is no time for a mystery because they keep killing the clues.
The Fisherman is a legit problem. The slicker is good. The hook is good. The silhouette has value. Is that enough to make him iconic? I don’t think so. He works in this movie because the setting does half his job for him: docks, fog, boats, rain, fish guts, class resentment, slippery surfaces, hanging pots… all the little textures of a town the movie both uses and seems slightly afraid of. The Anne Heche material, especially, feels like it was written by people whose idea of the country came from a Halloween store. Put a strange haircut on her, give her animal hides and fish heads, and there you go. Poorer parts of town equal suspicious! We have solved screenwriting!
Fascinatingly, the movie understands the good nightmare of help being close enough to hear and still not close enough to act. A parade is right there. A crowd is right there. A cop car is right there. Sarah Michelle Gellar’s chase is the best version of this, because the crowd turns against her without knowing it. They think they are watching a spectacle. She is trying not to die. That’s so mean.
The movie is weirdly chaste for something that arrived in the wake of Scream. It hides its eyes from sex and most of the gore. The kills are often aftermath more than event. Jennifer Love Hewitt came into this with Party of Five baggage, the virgin ingenue energy, the precious-gem treatment, and the movie seems determined to leave her unmussed. I think that’s to the movie’s discredit. You have Jennifer Love Hewitt in a slasher, at that moment, with that image, and you can either mess with the image or polish it. Why in the crab-filled trunk did they green light the polishing path?
So, no, I don’t think I Know What You Did Last Summer is a great slasher. I don’t think the Fisherman belongs in the S-tier. I don’t think the mystery plays fair or that the class stuff ages well or that the movie knows quite what to do with Jennifer Love Hewitt beyond protecting the brand.
But I like it. I like the hook. I like the town. I like the stupid letters. I like the bad decisions. I like the way it turns a summer celebration into a place where nobody is safe because everybody is looking at the wrong silly thing. It is dumb in ways I find charming and smart in ways I don’t think it comprehends.