Not as clever as it thinks it is

Rating: Null/10 (21 November 2001)

With the original murders now made into a best selling book and film, someone on campus begins to kill in the same way as before. As Sidney's (Campbell) friends begin to die off suspicion seems to point to all those round her.
I didn't really like the first Scream - I thought it was clever but that it revelled in it's own cruelty. Here the same problems exist. This wants to be a teen slasher movie but also be clever and look down it's nose at other slashers. It starts with the movie within a movie and uses that to make jokes out of all the things that were thrown at it first time round - causing real life violence, having no black people etc and of course it gets to discuss the rules for horror sequels and make fun of those. My problem with this is that it wants to laugh at slasher movies but also do the very things it's laughing at. This may be good once but twice and the joke wears thin, also when it is dealing with real-life issues rather than film 'rules' it is harder to swallow and misses the mark.
For example Jada Pinkett derides the film Stab for being "a white film" and having "no black people" etc, just like the first Scream. But you get the feeling that this joke is a sore spot because now we have several black leads in the film even when a group of white sorority girls are onscreen they will contain a token black character. The colour shouldn't be an issue, but by pointing it out and then ensuring that Scream 2 has plenty it makes you think all the black actors are there jut to make up a quota. It's the same in other areas - the opening murders in the cinema are meant to make us look at this crowd enjoying on-screen murder watch as Pinkett is killed. We're supposed to see how macabre it is that the audience loves the onscreen violence and then see how abhorrent Pinkett's terror-filled gruesome death is.....but then we (the audience) sit and get entertained by the violence and killing that follows. I do feel that the film can't have it both ways - say "look at this isn't it terrible" and proceed to do just what it was making fun of.
If horror is your thing then this is quite good. It has plenty of scares and jumps but it is just too cruel to be entertaining - it seems to not take fun from the excitement or the horror but from the sheer cruelty of the murders. It's not as scary as the first and most of the time you know what's going to happen - which is why the film ups the gore and cruelty of the killings - to give us something new and interesting. Outside of this the plot is funny at times but it isn't as self-referential as before. The best bits involve in-jokes among the cast such as Cox's character responding to nude internet pictures of her by saying it was just her head put onto Jennifer Anniston's body. But for the most part the mystery plot is silly and you do just sit and watch good-looking teens get picked off for 2 hours. The eventual twist is stupid - as one of the characters says "Wow! What a twist! bet you didn't see that coming!" Well, no - but only because the twist is so unpredictable that it's stupid. The film spends so much time making all the characters look suspicious and putting EVERYONE in a situation where they could be the killer, only to then go and do that!
The original cast all return with the addition of several black faces to even it up (Pinkett, Epps, Elise Neal and others) and a few famous TV faces (Buffy's Gellar, Ally McBeal's Portia de Rossi, Laurie Metcalf) all do well as the killer's victims. The film appears to be more carefree about killing it's main cast but bottles it at the end and makes sure it's got enough left over for a sequel. David Arquette and his wife have the most fun but other leads such as Gellar and Campbell just run around screaming with not much else to do until they die or confront the killer. Sad that the most beautiful woman in this only lasts 5 minutes (Pinkett) before being dispatched, Omar Epps deserved more than he got as well - but I guess the film isn't quite as equal opps as it would like to think.
Overall a horror movie that replaces scares with cruelty and insults us all by making us think that we can figure it all out before screwing us with an ending that comes out of nowhere. The cast were not shown the ending until the end of shooting but I feel that if they had they wouldn't have been able to rehearse with a straight face.