Movie Review: Scream (2022)
By Eric Hughes
January 30, 2022
This time, Scream is without its director, Wes Craven, who died in 2015. And, it’s largely without its writer, Kevin Williamson, who wrote all but Scream 3 but was brought on to this new project as an executive producer and as I understand it somewhat of an advisor to the filmmaking team. Despite that, the movie strikes a happy balance between comedy and suspense; between old characters and new characters. And, my feeling after ruminating on it over the past few days, it is the franchise’s best sequel since Scream 2 (1997).
Emulating Halloween (2018), which directly copied the name of the first film in its franchise and served as both a reboot and continuation of the Halloween story simultaneously, Scream (2022) copies those elements, too, but caked in the heavy-handed self-awareness we’ve come to expect from the series. Which, by the way, never seems to work as effectively when other movie franchises co-opt this plotting device that was popularized by Scream (see: The Matrix Resurrections).
Scream makes use of its legacy characters to great effect. For the first time, really, Sidney, Gale and Dewey are treated as fully-fleshed characters who by this point have notably evolved over the past few decades. Like the real-life Courteney Cox and David Arquette, who met each other on the set of Scream (1996), the on-screen Gale and Dewey have separated and are no longer married. Sidney is also now with Mark (presumably, Mark Kincaid from Scream 3) and is the mother of multiple children. Eerie, new killings in Woodsboro spring each of them out of peaceful retirement in order to teach a new generation of Woodsborians how to survive Ghostface’s brutality.
And brutality isn’t an oversell. In a series first, the kills in Scream are prolonged, very gruesome, but also distinctly creative. I don’t recall any of these as takeaways from the other movies. It’s certainly a far cry from Casey Becker’s (Drew Barrymore) death in the opening scene of Scream (1996), when the camera looked away from the carnage as Ghostface’s blade relentlessly stabbed its target.
In addition to Ortega’s Tara, new faces in Scream include Melissa Barrera, Mikey Madison, Dylan Minnette, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Dennis Quaid/Meg Ryan’s son, Jack Quaid and Cuba Gooding Jr.’s son, Mason Gooding. Standouts for me were Ortega and Madison, as both actresses demonstrated total commitments to their characters. Ortega, in particular, might be the best young actress that the franchise has ever had.
I also enjoyed Savoy Brown’s contributions to the film. Her character is the niece of the late Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy). Being a Meek, she purposefully explains the rules of “requels” - slang which describes Hollywood’s latest trend which proliferated following the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015). True to its form, Scream defines the requel, establishes the rules of the requel and then demonstrates how those rules operate over the course of the movie.
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