Scream 4 Offers Hackneyed Hacks

After a decade, the Scream franchise is back—and not much has changed. What the critics are saying:

• “How long can [director Wes] Craven and [writer Kevin] Williamson milk the same shtick—mocking B movies and being one—before the audience catches on that they’re running around in circles?” asks Michael O’Sullivan in the Washington Post. “There’s a certain pleasure that comes from going through the same familiar motions. But when does a comfortable groove become a rut?”

• The film “provides exactly what its audience will expect: one victim after another being slashed, skewered, stabbed, gutted, and sliced, with everyone in on the joke,” notes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times.
• Trouble is, writes Mike Hale in the New York Times, “in the 11 years since Scream 3, the joke has gotten pretty old.”
• Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, Giles Hardie is more supportive, calling the film “seriously fun, seriously funny, but most seriously not scary.” Courteney Cox, Neve Campbell, and David Arquette "are back, and with them a plethora of young Hollywood talent to provide a surprisingly energetic and fresh return to the self-parodying scare flick franchise."

(More Scream 4 stories.)