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Now in college, Julie spends her time having bad dreams in class and walking around the picturesque campus, where she alternately bemoans her fears and trades would-be witty teen-chic dialogue with her friends, played by Freddie Prinze Jr., Brandy Norwood, and other pretty-looking airheads. She even looks back at old pictures of Sarah Michelle Gellar in longing, giving one of the first film's victims a cameo she never asked for. Julie is content to stay indoors, away from the prickly hook of Ben Willis, who you might remember as the first movie's desperate attempt to create an iconic villain with a memorable name. But when Brandy randomly wins a radio contest, Julie does an about-face and heads off to Brazil, where the movie gets worse.
The film's first act is a veritable cornucopia of tense moments that amount to precisely nothing. Is that the killer who's walking around in the shadows of Julie's apartment? No, it's just Brandy hiding in the closet, for seemingly no other reason than the screenplay required her to. But wait, is that Ben Willis standing in the shadows of a dance club balcony? No such luck. What about the shadowy figure on the dance floor? Guess not. Julie sees a lot of shadowy figures in shadowy places throughout the movie, which is so thoroughly repetitive in its blind alleys that it's almost entertaining as a parody of itself.
So bankrupt for ideas is I Still Know... that Hewitt must endure the ever-annoying 'she-sees-it-and-no-one-else-does' scenario; she feels Ben Willis closing in on her, but no one, not even her friends, backs her up. She sees messages that aren't really there... or are they? She sees dead bodies that quickly disappear. The movie carries on this charade for over an hour even though the audience knows that Julie is unequivocally correct, which makes the story simultaneously boring and infuriating.
The movie is also tedious, holding off on killing its main characters for so long that it resorts to offing unfortunate side characters, most of which are minorities (save an uncredited Jack Black, who plays a character trying to be a minority). Half of the central characters are also minorities, except instead of being killed, they are treated as stereotypes. Brandy, as Hewitt's best friend, exudes vacant sassiness; as her boyfriend, Mekhi Phifer does nothing but beg for sex. In the white half of the movie, Hewitt plays her role as sincerely as she can, which is a fool's errand in a movie like this, but the film is interested only in showing her in silk robes, wet towels, and skimpy bathing suits. Freddie Prinze Jr. is sidelined quickly so he doesn't have to appear in the movie very much. When he does re-emerge, he is relegated to his own ridiculous subplot that is, if possible, even more boring than the central plot. In his absence, an actor named Matthew Settle steps in to play the mild-mannered friend who has a secret crush on Julie, and he is one of the worst actors I have ever seen.
Then there is the matter of I Still Know What You Did Last Summer's ending, which in terms of film etiquette would be cruel to give away, but in terms of common sense should be publicly derided for turning a merely incompetent movie into a shamelessly manipulative one. Without giving too much away, let it suffice that this ending is essentially a carbon copy of the first movie's manipulative ending, and that it reminded me of how most of the R.L. Stine Goosebumps books end.
Well, not so horrible...
