With the successful reboot of Scream and the shockingly good Final Destination: Bloodlines, there’s a certain inevitability that permeates most of the 2025 version of I Know What You Did Last Summer, a project that’s content to bloodily check boxes instead of doing anything actually interesting. The 1997 box office smash was always a little clunky, but its simplicity grew somewhat refreshing over the last 28 years, especially as the horror genre shifted from the direct scares of the slasher flick to the “elevated” offerings of the A24 era. The thought of going back to basics with a modern version of the urban legend that spawned the original was understandably tempting, with even Mike Flanagan circling the idea around a decade ago. Sadly, 10 years later, what has spurted out of the nostalgia machine that is the current Hollywood blockbuster system is an inert snore, a movie with a few memorable kills and reasonable performances, but one that’s, by and large, poorly paced and even more poorly written. History may have given the first film a reputation as dumb fun, but this one’s just dumb.

Chase Sui Wonders is effective as Ava, one of five friends who do something morally questionable on the fourth of July in the small town of Southport. She’s with BFF Danica (Madelyn Cline), old crush Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), Danica’s fiancé Teddy (Tyriq Withers), and former friend Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon) on that night when Teddy is being an idiot in the street, forcing a car to swerve, crashing through a guard rail and to the rocks below. Yes, writers Sam Lansky & Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (who directs) don’t even really push our protagonists into the same murky waters as the original, which at least allowed one of the good guys to drive drunk into their victim. Yes, of course, Ava & company should have gone down to help the driver, and, yes, of course, they should have told the police about their role in what happened. But the watering down of their culpability is indicative of a film that lacks teeth.

Of course, a year later, the murder spree starts with a note that says, “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” Before you know it, people around the quintet of secret holders start getting sliced up by a fisherman with a hook, forcing Ava to find someone who has seen this all before: Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt). It turns out that Julie and Ray got married! And then split up in an ugly divorce! The breakup sent Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr) back to Southport, where he runs the local bar and complains about how the town’s power player (Billy Campbell) has papered over the town’s history to turn it into a mini-Hamptons.

The movie raises the specter of true crime in the form of a podcast host of a show called “Live Laugh Slaughter,” but then takes that nowhere. Julie’s trauma seems to be there just to give her character a defining trait, but the movie doesn’t have anything to say about it there either. It’s not a big deal for a slasher movie not to really delve into deep themes, but it’s frustrating to see one that moves in that direction and then almost seems afraid to go there. It’s a movie that’s constantly, almost aggressively, happy to stay put.

The overall shallowness of I Know What You Did Last Summer would be fine if it were just better made. In particular, the editing by Saira Haider is just off rhythm. The kill scenes are particularly inconsistent as the first couple strike a tone of gory fun, but the back half of the film plays out like more serious fare. By the time a character is calling for his mother as he bleeds to death, the tonal balance is totally gone, shifting into disturbing in a truly unentertaining way. Even worse, the film’s pace never clicks in, as evidenced by its 111-minute runtime. Say what you will about the slasher genre resurgence that made the first movie a hit, those directors knew how to bring it in under 100.

As for performance, Wonders is good enough, and Withers has a bit of a future star air to him, but this ensemble seems unlikely to pop like the original, which really did catapult its leads to more work. Say what you will about the acting chops of Ryan Philippe and/or Sarah Michelle Gellar, there was a spark to the casting of the 1997 version that’s missing here, too.