Arguably superior to the first film.

Rating: 7/10 (11 March 2017)

Scream 2. As much as you may love the original Scream, you may not enjoy Scream 2 nearly as much. Most fans consider the first superior; it has a 6.1 compared to Scream's 7.2 on IMDb, a 61% on Metacritic to Scream's 63%, and it rarely beats the original in both forums and rankings of the films. (To be fair, it does have 2% higher on Rotten Tomatoes, at 81%, to Scream's 79%.) After all it is a sequel, which deems it a dumping ground for many fans of the genre, including Randy.
Randy's argument in Scream 2 is simple: sequels are often paint-by-the- numbers Hollywood cash grabs (looking at you, Friday the 13th Part 2), following the original verbatim, with no original screams or laughs. Scream 2 initially does follow the structure of the original. The victims of the second movie match those in the first movie to a limited extent, leading Gale to invent the copycat theory, which states that the killer is patterning himself after the original film.
Williamson is, in the meta style beloved by fans of the franchise, stating that Scream 2 is, prior to his death, inferior to the original. After this point in the film the copycat theory falls apart, as Randy was obviously not killed in the original. Starting at this point, the film becomes far more exciting: all bets are off, as the death of the franchise's most beloved supporting character kicks off a whirlwind building to an epic chase in a theater which comprises roughly the second half of the film.
One of the more often discussed points of Scream 2 is that Mickey's love for sequels foreshadows that he is the killer. Sidney believed Billy and Stu killed because they "had seen one too many horror movies"; she may also have believed that Mickey simply took his love of sequels too far, leading him to join the serial killer network described by Mrs. Loomis near the end of the film and promptly join her on the murderous rampage which claimed the lives of eight innocent students. In effect, Mickey symbolizes support for the sequel in the horror genre, and when he kills Randy, who represents disdain for sequels (going so far as to claim they ruined the horror genre), Williamson sends a much-needed "fuck you" to those who, although fans of the first film, disregard the second.
Furthermore, as sequels are often deemed unoriginal, enjoying them may imply that sequel lovers are themselves less original. In Scream 2, this is certainly true, as Mickey's motivations are hardly unique, both in that he agrees with the moral majority which believes horror movies create psychos and in that he fills in for Stu's role in the first film, in acting as the sidekick who is first to go. Williamson would be hard-pressed to cite an example of Mickey expanding meaningfully on the Scream mythos as he functions as a killer. In effect, Mickey himself also represents the convention of the horror sequel: a paint-by-the-numbers cash grab (as I described earlier). Thus, Mickey's death essentially represents the death of the unoriginal sequel; much as Scream hoped to end horror clichés such as "I'll be right back" and investigating a strange noise, Scream 2 hopes to end unoriginal sequels.
I have heard criticisms that Mickey's character is too on-the-nose, in that he is a film director ranting about the psychological effects of horror films. However, this critique falls apart quickly when we compare it against the incredible reveal in Scream 1, in which Billy states the famous line, "movies don't make psychos, Sid. Movies make psychos more creative". The Scream franchise has never been particularly subtle, ranging from the thinly veiled allusions to Columbine in Scream 3, the aforementioned scenes in both the original and the sequel, and the rant about the increasingly contrived additions to the Stab franchise (time travel is a major plot point of Stab 5) which implies the pointlessness of any Scream film past Scream 3. And I have never heard any of those films criticized for their bluntness.
Scream 2 understands the genre deeper than even the original film. Its first major point of analysis is its middle finger to detractors, its second the (naive) death of unoriginal genre sequels. However, there is another key insight.
It occurs when Mrs. Loomis shoots Mickey. In order to understand why this death matters, we have to understand what Mrs. Loomis represents. Out of all seven killers within the movie franchise, nine counting the MTV television series, Mrs. Loomis is the only one not affiliated with the genre in some way or form. Billy and Stu are casual fans who took pointers from the genre. Billy mentions The Exorcist, and Stu mentions watching a few horror movies, likely slashers such as Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street- and taking notes. Mickey is a film student, obsessed with proving that sequels can be better than the original. Roman is a film director who abandons his in-movie movie Stab 3 for the real movie Scream 3 and set in motion the events of the first film, after creating a "family film" documenting the affair between Maureen Prescott and Hank Loomis, Billy's father. Jill enjoys watching Shaun of the Dead with Kirby. Charlie flirts with Kirby about minute details of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, films everything, and asks his classmates randomly what their favorite scary movie is, awkwardly Ghostface without Piper is familiar with horror tropes, as we learn in her reveal in which she rants about the sexist assumption that the killer had to be the son of Brandon James, and finally, Kieran does not seem to be aware of the genre, but he is a bit of an exception already, having been the only Ghostface to be killed by another Ghostface and be part of 2 separate killing sprees.