"This isn't a movie. This is life." Really? You wouldn't know it by the script.

Rating: 3/10 (6 May 2010)

Tell me, if you're a writer who writes a cliché, predictable story, can you excuse your bad writing by having your characters state, within the movie, that they know it is cliché and predictable? This is my problem with Kevin Williamson's script, and this movie in general. You can't excuse a tired plot by having your "hipster" characters acknowledge every cliché from previous movies in the genre. It really is for five year-olds, there's nothing subtle about it at all. The viewer is beaten over the head in this film with constant references to other films in the genre. This self-awareness has been called new and edgy, instead of what it really is: a total cop-out. Why write characters so self-aware of all the genre pitfalls, only to have them execute the same bad decisions in their own reality? Such a waste.
"Scream" was heralded for being different from the pack because it was the first mainstream horror movie to parody the characters' situations and point out the flaws in the genre, but really, the idea was very simplistic. "Scream" differs from other genre films only in the fact the characters talk as if they're in a horror movie, while the rest of the film is just as predictable as any other movie in the genre. Changing one small ingredient in the recipe doesn't affect the end result that much. A child could have conceived the idea.
The characters exist in a world where horror movies can happen just like in the fantasy of motion pictures--the killer can seemingly be everywhere at once, the heroine can elude her pursuer until the film's finale, and other characters conveniently find themselves in situations where they are far too easy for the killer to pick off. Of course, real life is a bit different, which ironically the main character says at one point in the film, right before we get treated to every horror cliché in the book before the grand "finale", which plays out just like a movie. Such a shame more of an effort wasn't made to create a better movie that sent a more believable message about the genre as a whole: that the killers aren't superhuman, not everything will go according to plan, the heroine will not always survive, and not everything plays out like a scene from a movie. That would have been a far better message than what we ultimately get here.