Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson bring the knife back to Woodsboro with the jokes intact and the scares mostly missing. The opening and the last twenty minutes are the sharpest the series has been since the first film; the hour between them is deputies sitting in cars.
Fifteen years after the first Scream, Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson go back to Woodsboro and to the joke that made the original work: everyone in town has seen the films and knows what happens next. This time the target is the remake, and the phones the kids never put down. Scream 4 runs 111 minutes and the tagline promises new rules. It delivers some of them, in the first fifteen minutes and the last twenty, and spends the hour in between looking for the others.
The opening is the best stretch of writing Williamson has done for the series since the first one. It starts with two girls, a phone and a knife, and then it starts again, and the second start turns out to be a film inside the film, with characters complaining about the film they are in. Peter McNulty cuts these false starts fast, the ringtone landing on the edit, and the dialogue is quick and sour. We laughed, properly, several times in the first ten minutes. Then the joke came round once more and we felt it being explained to us, which is a feeling the film produces more than once.
Hayden Panettiere’s Kirby Reed is the reason to sit through the middle. She plays a girl who knows every title and every rule and is not nearly frightened enough by either, and she gets the one scene of real suspense in the film. Courteney Cox has the best lines as Gale Weathers-Riley, a writer with nothing to write. Alison Brie, as Sidney’s publicist Rebecca Walters, is funny in her few scenes. Neve Campbell, top-billed, spends a good deal of the running time on her aunt’s stairs (Mary McDonnell is Kate Roberts), being told things, and the film has no idea what to do with a survivor who is now a grown woman with a book.
The middle is the problem, and the problem is staging. Peter Deming shoots the interiors bright and flat, like a television pilot, and the night exteriors in a blue-grey murk in which every lawn looks like every other. Craven built the first film’s set pieces on geography: you knew where the garage door was, and where the cat flap was, before either mattered. Here a girl runs down a corridor, a robe appears in a doorway, and we could not have drawn you a plan of any house in the film. Marco Beltrami’s stabbing strings do the work the images will not. Dewey Riley has three deputies, played by Marley Shelton, Anthony Anderson and Adam Brody, and their scenes in patrol cars go nowhere at all.
The violence is nastier than before, and this is the one place the film got at us. The knives go in and stay in, and Craven holds on the faces. One killing in a kitchen made us flinch and then feel a little grubby, because the scene before it had been laughing at exactly that kind of death. Adam Stockhausen’s Roberts house is a big suburban box of windows and half-landings, useful for a knife to come through, and Debra McGuire dresses the teenagers in the jeans and hoodies of an American teen network while leaving the robe exactly as it was. That is the right call. The costume is the one thing here nobody thought to update.
Emma Roberts, as Sidney’s cousin Jill, is sulky and a little blank, and Rory Culkin and Erik Knudsen, as the two boys who explain the rules of a remake to a room, are given a lecture rather than parts. Knudsen wears a camera on his head and streams his life, which the script treats as the whole of the internet. The film has things to say about fame and about wanting to be the girl in the story, and it says them, in dialogue, more than once. The last stretch takes turns we will not describe, and the reveal has a real idea in it. It is the only part of the film that uses the idea rather than announcing it.
Against Craven’s own record it is a middling entry: not the laziness of a studio sequel, since the people who made the first one are plainly still trying, but not the thing itself either. See it if you liked the earlier films and can quote the rules yourself. The 15 certificate is earned. Watch it with someone who will answer the phone halfway through; the film would approve.
