But this isn’t about watching an accident unfold

But this isn’t about watching an accident unfold before your eyes; the wheels would come off even the highest-performance racecar turning a corner this fast, let alone a sputtering vehicle with as much mileage on it as Scream 4. This is about that jaded moviegoing cohort I was telling you about Christian Dior Sunglasses, a group for whom nihilism and bald-faced condescension wash over like a narcotic rush. Beaten all their lives by a film culture with seemingly nowhere to go but down, they confuse such vicious abuse as this with getting the film they deserve. It’s all disguised as commentary, of course, with misogyny-as-girl power and self-destruction-as-self-actualization larded in there with the one-liners. You almost wish you were watching Saw 4 at a certain point, if only because torture porn has the courage of no convictions. Meanwhile, Williamson and Craven have crafted the perfect Scream film for the Charlie Sheen age, a bloated, overhyped folly trading the intelligence of its origins for empty calories and dull platitudes — or Oakley Sunglasses Cheap, as they call it in Hollywood, what the kidz want. #Winning, etc. It’s not hard to believe reports that the pair lost control of the project somewhere along the way (both Kruger and studio boss Bob Weinstein have been accused of various muckery), but the consistency of Scream 4’s mean-spiritedness — to its characters, fans and legacy alike — implicates more than one or two people. It implicates more than a whole genre as well. It implicates the whole narcissistic era of which it’s a product, yet is too myopic and ADD-addled and inbred to have any hope of self-diagnosis Arnette Sunglasses. It would have a very good shot at being entertaining were it not so outwardly concerned with being important.