'Scream VI' cuts out what's left of the original to make itself survive

Following the events of the Legacy Killings, Sam Carpenter (Melissa Barrera) and her half-sister Tara (Jenna Ortega) have moved to New York to start over and put the past behind them. However, when a string of violent murders take place with someone wearing the Ghostface mask in New York, familiar faces (Courtney Cox, Hayden Panetierre) reappear with some new ones (Dermot Mulroney, Josh Segarra) to help stop the Ghostface killer from wreaking havoc across the Big Apple...

There's a moment in 'Scream VI' when the audience surrogate, played by Jamie Kennedy in the original but now played by Jasmin Savoy Brown, exclaims loudly to the assembled members of the cast that they're now in a franchise, and that the old legacy and the old rules don't apply anymore. In effect, anyone - even if you're Courtney Cox or a rising star like Jenna Ortega - can be killed. For about 70% of 'Scream VI', it offers some promise in making things unique and vibrantly different - right before it just collapses into the familiar routines and setpieces to get itself across the line.

'Scream VI' is galling because it's almost as if the writers - James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, both of them back for seconds from the 2022 revival - chickened out of the ending they initially wrote, and reverted back to something familiar and safe instead. Up until that point, however, 'Scream VI' blitzes through the setpieces and rattles along with a jagged intensity that it hasn't had in years. The absence of Neve Campbell doesn't do anything to slow things or set things back, and in fact, it actually helps to free the thing from its past. Courtney Cox goes full tilt as Gale Weathers once again, being chased around a huge New York apartment that was clearly bought with 'Friends' money and certainly not TV journalist money.

Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera aren't necessarily driving the story forward so much as they're just caught up in the jetstream. Ortega, in particular, only gets a handful of opportunities to display her dry wit and quippy nature, while Melissa Barrera looks suitably anguished at her family's convoluted murder history. Dermot Mulroney and Hayden Panettiere both do an OK job of being the grown-ups to everyone else, while Jasmin Savoy-Brown and Mason Gooding continue to be underserved by the story and essentially treated like after-thoughts.

After the commercial and critical success - relatively speaking for the franchise - of 2022's 'Scream', it makes sense to bring back as many of the people who made it and give them a bigger budget and a new location. While New York does figure into the setpieces - there's an extended subway sequence with Ghostface knifing someone while the carriage goes dark - it feels as though it has little in the way of a purpose. It could just as easily have been set back in Atlanta or Vancouver or anywhere, but New York as a stage offers a lot of possibilities that are almost never taken up.

'Scream VI' is serviceable stuff, nothing particularly spectacular and slices off enough of its own past to keep it lean and moving forward. The absence of real scares and the addition of more blood and guts doesn't do all that much for it, but like its characters all say, it's in a franchise now.