Scream 4

Sometimes, the longer a franchise goes on, the less well you start to think of the earlier films. Certainly this is now true for Pirates of the Caribbean. Will it be true of the upcoming Mission Impossible 4? The first and third movies were entertaining and will probably remain so. As bad as the fourth Indiana Jones was, it surely won’t affect the reputation of the first three, and Die Hard 4 wasn’t that bad in the first place (albeit perhaps just as an ordinary action film). Scream 4, however, seriously makes one question the value of the earlier films. The second and third movies weren’t that interesting anyway, and the rehashing of anything original about the first film in this fourth one, makes the whole franchise seem a waste of time. The larger, gruesome body-count isn’t likely to impress many viewers. The reversals, the genre-play, and self-referential irony, is no longer amusing. It was all done in the first film, and didn’t need repeating. It seems like the desire to make a fourth movie came before the ideas to put in it. This is often the reason for a franchise’s failure. When you put desire before ideas, you often come up bankrupt (creatively, as well as occasionally financially – although, as Mark Kermode has pointed out in relation to other bad movies, this film was a box office success). The characters are no longer engaging or interesting. What is Sidney (Neve Campbell) doing with her life? Like the heroes of other franchises, she has become a blank, uninteresting space at the centre of the film. All her issues were resolved in earlier movies. What’s strange is that it is relatively easy to please audiences of franchises by having certain characters say or do certain things again and again. Even if you were a die-hard fan of these movies, however, I’d tell you that there was very little to be gained from watching this fourth film. That, I think, says it all.