2 out of 5

Directed by: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett

I’m really not trying to go for anything clever here, but sincerely: With Scream IV, the Scream franchise’s metaness has seemingly wrapped back around to where the fresh take is just to be completely conventional.

…Though obviously that’s not a very fresh take at all. And ‘completely conventional’ seems to come with an unironic dollop of all the plot holes and repetition and lack of stakes of your average slasher, alongside a rather disappointingly humdrum shooting style, which seemed to prioritize keeping scenes moving over necessarily making them interesting. (Noting that, despite this prioritization, the film ekes out to just over two hours may also account for my lower rating.)

Scream VI does stick to the film series’ ongoing thread of following the survivors from one film to the next, returning to sisters Sam and Tara (Melissa Barrera, Jenna Ortega) as the latter goes to college, and the former annoys her sister by playing the ever-protective den mother. Others from the former film have tagged along as well – siblings Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Chad (Mason Gooding), and we also keep with the standard of opening with a Ghostface kill, which writers James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick do attempt to give some wiggle to by exposing the killer right away, but we move so fast into the reversal of that that any novelty is kind of lost.

Which ends up being a good summary of the movie’s style, as some conceptually sound ideas get shoved aside for a central sound idea – that the majority of the movie is a pretty non-stop chase – but this also treats all the franchise staples as things to move past as quickly as possible, to the point where it really feels like the creators hardly want to be making a Scream flick. Some of the other entries have gone too far up the bum of self-reference; this is the opposite: the movie is faceless, despite being steeped in lore. None of this is ever all that complex, however, the fact that you could drop the plot into any other slasher template and not miss a beat feels… wrong. And even though the brutality is theoretically amped up – our Ghostface is very stabby, very quickly, and is not stopped by being in public places – that similarly sacrifices something: it’s so relentlessly cat and mouse that the stakes feel pretty pointless. The kills are characters we’ve met minimum seconds ago, and the film trips over its own feet trying to “comment” on whether or not you can kill legacy characters to an extent that makes you just want them to get on with it. Sensing that, that’s exactly what the movie does… ushering in the above problems even moreso.

Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett handle the large scale city setting well, jostling us between parties and crowded shops and subways, but there’s something artificial about all of this as well (setting aside the New York setting is actually Montreal); moving from place to place without establishing much sense of those places wastes the varied feeling of the locales. A narrow example is when the chase takes Tara and Sam to a little corner deli, hiding between aisles. This is an easy setting to make familiar, but we never get a real sense of the geometry and size, and so everyone teleports from aisle to aisle. There’s no tension.

The positive take on all of this is that the movie is pretty easy to watch. It’s not nearly as tension-filled as its nonstop cat-and-mouse allows for, and the pacing is rather running-to-nowhere – you just arrive at the ending, sans much buildup – but the cast has acceptable camaraderie, and it all looks slick enough, allowing the utter predictability and template nature of the flick to pass by not quickly, but not painfully, either.