Review of Scream 3 (2000) by Movie G — 23 Aug 2011

(WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS OF SCREAM & SCREAM 2, IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THEM YET, 1. DON'T READ THIS, 2. WHY THE HELL HAVEN'T YOU SEEN THE?).

Scream 3 is almost certainly the weakest of the series. It took everything great that the first two movies accomplished and just threw it out the window. Gone are the jokes, good acting, and unpredictable plot, and it focuses way too much on a not very good backstory.

First of all, the franchise's main character Sidney is barely in it. She doesn't come until the plot until about half way in, and even then she doesn't do much. Neve Campbell still plays her pretty well, but it's still weird to watch a Scream movie without her. David Arquette loses the charm he had of the first movie thanks to bad lines and just comes off as awful. Courtney Cox is once again annoying. There's also a bunch of new characters who are supposed to be the actors in the movie based on the killings. All are pretty bad, but Parker Posey does an okay job.

As I mentioned before this film isn't very funny. I don't blame it because what could it really make fun of now? They alrleady did horror cliches and they already did sequels. They sort of have the same theme in it. The whole movie is about trilogy's and how in the third one anyone can happen, but now there making a fourth so this movie is now pretty much pointless. They even brought back Randy played by Jamie Kennedy back from the dead via a video will to explain the rules of trilogies. Sure it's nice to see another one of his signature lists, but it's just kind of stupid. It's like they know they messed up by killing him in the second one.

Most of the problems with this movie come down to the screenplay. It wasn't written by Kevin Williamson, so it lacks the wittyness of his two scripts. A lot of the lines are really corny and just sound bad. As I mentioned before a lot of these make some solid actors seem pretty bad.

As I mentioned before the movie focuses a lot on backstory, which sucks. I tries to give motivation to the killers from the first movie, but that just made me mad. I thought the first movie was absolutely perfect. The killers were perfect and I thought that the killers in it were so unbelievably good, and didn't have a whole lot of motivation, they had some, but for the most part they just liked to do it, which I thought was very effective.

The first two movies always had you guessing. The first movie tried to make you confused and I probably switched who I thought the killer was 15 times. The 2nd movie was a little less effective, but still surprising. This one is so predictable that I knew who the killer was about 5 minutes into it. The second I saw him/her I knew it was them. That really sucked.

I won't really talk about the direction, camerawork, music or other technical stuff because it's all exactly the same as the other to movies.

All in all my main problem with Scream 3 is that it became exactly what the series was making fun of in the first place. It's an unneccesary sequel made just to cash in on the first two films. It's not well acted nor well written, but it still has some solid technical aspects that make Scream 3 at least watchable. Lets just hope Scream 4 will be better!