"For Wes."

Lol shut the fuck up.

Sometime, somewhere, a few people went: "What if Scream 4... but sucks?" The thing about Wes Craven - beyond all the qualities that made him a beautiful human being (and an exceptional craftsman) - is that he always cherished a prescient fulfillment of empathy for his victims, as much as there was the prominence of tragedy within his ruthless but intimate violence. He believed in the cinematic power of redemption; more so, in this franchise's construction, of twisting a perpetual cycle of violence and nihilism into something that evolves through images, but can end and bring peace (cleverly accompanied by not only the metatextual poignancy of its cultural satire & subverted rules - from the agency of celluloid to reality - but also of the formal ingenuity of Craven's set-piece construction). He was as playful, wittily and narratively, as he was challenging but wholehearted in his recontextualizations: in images, media consumption, and traumatic events - strung to the fundamental structuring of a whodunit, alongside numerous other points of interest. He always saw a point beyond the violence. Scream 5 doesn't. It's a derivative, blissfully useless commodification of the aforementioned, built upon the imitative pretense of "here's some hypocritical, cynical shit about legacy sequels... now watch us hit all of the worst beats of those films, but if you criticize us for it then we're right." The formal construction is almost as vacant and stationary as the dramatic immobility of the narrative, further fitted with uncreative kills. There's nothing you can't predict within the first ten minutes, nor is there anything else this film won't transform into the vain nullity of something like Fear Street. A depressing indictment, considering the non-conforming nature and attempts of Craven's films. But this one? It's a non-self-aware celebration of tropes. Barrera can't act. No more of these ever again, thanks.