Scream (2022) Review

 "I've seen this movie before."

-Sidney Prescott

In the town of Woodsboro, Ghostface returns and starts attacking and killing people.  The deadly game draws in plenty of suspects, both new and old, and no one is safe.

Spoilers ahead.  The Scream movies are all whodunnits, so of course there are going to be spoilers in this review.  If you like the Scream movies, you'll like this one a lot, so drop what you're doing and go see it.

What Works:

I'll start with the opening.  The Scream movies are famous for starting off with a well-know actor getting killed off in a terrifying opening sequence.  This time around, it was all over the marketing, and we all knew Jenna Ortega's character, Tara, was going to bite it very quickly.  And it looked like we were all going to be right.  She gets brutally attacked and it's one of the gorier moments in the franchise.  Except, she lives!  In a twist I was not expecting, Tara lives and is a major player in the rest of the film.  It's an excellent twist on the formula and keeps an extremely sympathetic character around to get us invested early on.  Genius!

Speaking of gore, the kills are very solid and better than a lot of the ones from the sequels.  They aren't super creative, mostly just stabs, which is par for the course with this series, but they are at least brutal and violent.  These characters don't go down in one stab like many that came before.  They get gutted and we see it all most of the time.  I love it!

I was surprised to see that the new characters were very much the focus of the film.  In Scream 4, which has a similar plot, the teenage characters were there, but not as focused on as Sidney (Neve Campbell), Dewey (David Arquette), and Gale (Courtney Cox).  That's not the case this time and I appreciate it.  Most of the new characters are well-developed, funny, or interesting.  My favorite is definitely the new Randy, Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown), who knows all of the rules and is the niece of Randy.

I was also a fan of the new protagonist, Sam (Melissa Barrera).  She's an interesting character and I loved her scenes with Ortega.  She's also a somewhat unhinged character and is willing to get more violent than Sidney ever has, which I love.  

My big problem with Scream 3 and 4 is I never felt that any of the holy trinity of Scream characters, Sidney, Dewey, and Gale, were ever in any danger.  Movies lose suspense when you know that characters are safe.  That isn't the case here and I'm very glad for that.  As sad as it was to see Dewey get horribly murdered, it needed to happen to make it felt like no on was safe.

What Sucks:

I said above that most of the new characters were well-developed, funny, or interesting.  Most.  There were a few that fell pretty flat for me.  When we get the classic Scream introduction seen where we meet all the characters, it happens pretty fast and I didn't get a good handle on any of the teenagers.  Fortunately, we get to know most of them over the course of the film.  Amber (Mikey Madison) and Liv (Sonia Ben Ammar) don't get that treatment.  I never felt we got to know their characters.  And even most of the characters we did get to know and like, I never understood what their motives would be to be the killer.  That's really important in a whodunnit.

Verdict:

Scream 5 manages to be another really solid entry in the series.  I like it more than the 2nd and 3rd movies, but not as much as the 1st and 4th.  Still, it does good job thanks to a fun twist in the opening, brutal gore, solid characters, and the tension knowing that no one was safe.  Not all of the characters were developed enough, but this movie has absolutely got it going on.

 9/10: Great