Warning: This review gives out crucial plot information. Do not read further if you wish to be surprised.
THEY'RE GONNA KILL ME IN THE MOVIES by Kristian Lin
Director Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson are B.S. artists. But they're great B.S. artists, and they're getting better at it. I'm one of the minority who found much of the cleverness in the original SCREAM to be pseudoclever and self-congratulatory (although, I admit, I enjoyed it all the same). I enjoyed SCREAM 2 even more, although I have some of the same mixed feelings.
The sequel follows Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) to college, where she has moved from Woodsboro (where the original movie's murders took place) and now majors in theater. Movie geek Randy (Jamie Kennedy) is there, too, studying film. So is a copycat killer, who strikes at the premiere of a movie called "Stab," which is based on the account of the Woodsboro murders by Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox). Sure enough, Gale shows up looking for her next story, as does Dewey (David Arquette), who wants to protect Sidney.
The killer's first three victims are college students played by Omar Epps, Jada Pinkett, and Sarah Michelle Gellar. This totally wiped me out. At least the black couple gets an entertaining conversation about the absence of African-Americans in slasher movies (Pinkett watches Heather Graham playing Drew Barrymore's part in "Stab" and says, "Bitch, hang up the phone and star 69 his ass.") But the incisive, dewy-eyed Gellar doesn't even get a chance to register. Fortunately, some compensation comes from the other actors. The brawny Jerry O'Connell proves unexpectedly light on his feet as Sidney's boyfriend, and he gets to serenade her in a cafeteria with "I Think I Love You" (à la Rupert Everett in MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING). Liev Schreiber only had a cameo in SCREAM as Cotton Weary, the man wrongly accused of Sidney's mother's murder. The role is considerably expanded here, and he disturbingly suggests that Cotton might be guilty of something after all.
But all these new faces only drew my attention to the old ones, and I made some observations that escaped me when I saw the original. Then again, maybe it was just Neve Campbell's hair that made me think about her acting. Her hair, long in the original, is bobbed here. The new 'do leaves her face more exposed, and it makes her look leaner, as if the various tragedies in her life have scraped her down to the bone. But it also drew my attention to her facial expressions, and she only uses a few in the SCREAM movies. She has the one scared look, and then she adjusts it slightly for her tough look, when she faces down the killer. Then she has that toothy grin that she occasionally flashes. I'm not a "Party of Five" watcher, so I might be missing something. But the SCREAM plots seem to be limiting her range - as she's written, Sidney Prescott is a normal young woman who just happens to have had four people in her life murder 11 other people. Sidney's seen so much death, you wouldn't blame her if she snapped and started slashing up victims herself in SCREAM'S inevitable third installment. And beyond that, I don't know who she is. This isn't all or even half Campbell's fault. But she doesn't suggest any more about the character.
Character problems hamper Courteney Cox, too. Not that she has the wrong attitude - on the contrary, she seems relieved to indulge the nasty side that her Monica Geller frequently represses on "Friends." But Gale Weathers really needed an actress who could be mean in broader strokes, say, Kelly Preston. Cox's subtler skills fit the TV screen and would probably do really well in smaller movie roles, but in a part like this, she doesn't fill the bill. Further, Williamson tries to complicate Gale by showing her concern for Dewey - her one redeeming feature. It's an admirable impulse, but the writer doesn't make it jibe with the rest of the character. Cox, a smart actress, seems unsure of the precise boundaries of Gale's bitchiness. I'm not sure myself. The part was smaller in the original, but it's only going to expand, and it needs to be fixed.
I came out of SCREAM 2 feeling energized by its cleverness but also with the same oddly depressed feeling I got from the original. It isn't that I have Gene Siskel's prejudice against serial killer movies - they're as formulaic as any other film genre, and I think THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS may still be the decade's greatest film. That movie boasted a literate, rational, superintelligent killer fully capable of assessing situations and analyzing other people. Killers in these movies tend to be mute death machines who kill people without distinction. Well, but what about the monster in the ALIEN movies? OK, that killer isn't interesting, but its potential victims are fully developed people (especially Ripley, of course, and her shipmates in the first movie). The victims in most slasher movies are just as much cardboard figures as the murderer. That's less the case in the SCREAM movies - the characterizations are still thin, but at least they're somewhat defined. The problem is that they're all helpless in the face of this killer, which annihilates dramatic possibilities. The great cast in SCREAM 2 only highlights this; you can't help watching the demises of Epps, Pinkett and Gellar without lamenting the waste of perfectly good actors. These movies are fun, but wasn't the final confrontation in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS all the more nerve-wracking because you knew who Clarice Starling and Jame Gumb were?
My favorite moment in SCREAM 2 is when Randy strikes back at the killer during their phone conversation. He starts off sarcastically, saying that his favorite scary movie is SHOWGIRLS. Eventually, though, he turns insulting. "Why are you imitating a couple of high school losers?" he yells into the phone, and he starts casting aspersions at the original killers, particularly Billy Loomis, whom Randy characterizes as a repressed homosexual mama's boy. Randy is killed a moment later, and his verbal outburst is his final blaze of glory. His smart-ass attitude makes him a marginally more deserving candidate for death than the others, but he also hits the killer's psychological weak spot. It's like Dennis Hopper goading Christopher Walken into killing him in TRUE ROMANCE. Randy's victory is only a moral one (and, like most moral victories, an empty one), but he does what no one else in the two movies manages to do. Sidney and Gale stop the killers, but only Randy makes him lose control. It's one moment where the SCREAM franchise touches greatness.
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