To All the Boys franchise dropped their third and final instalment on Netflix on February 12 and To All The Boys: Always and Forever felt like we were peeking into the home of a married couple, very much in love, through the window of undeniable marital bliss. It’s cute to watch for 30 seconds and coo over the romance and understanding, but what after that? Disappointing viewers one scene after another, this vanilla film couldn’t be saved with Peter Kavinsky’s (Noah Centineo) soulful eyes and Lara Jean Song-Covey’s (Lana Condor) earnest words. While each scene is a visual delight and a kawaii dream come to life, their sartorial choices had us scrambling to look at our own high school pictures — a nightmare for those who never peaked in school!
The first film of the franchise, To All The Boys I have Loved Before, based on the eponymous trilogy by Jenny Han, had Lara Jean’s sister Kitty mailing her secret love letters to her crushes through junior and middle school. What began on a chaotic note of frantic boys trying to make sense of her letters from the past, soon developed into a cute love story between a shy girl and the school jock — ‘PK + LJ’. The second instalment, To All The Boys: P.S. I Still Love You introduced another Jordan Fisher entering the competition with his disarming smile, which got us through a mediocre plotline. However, there is nothing to save this third and final film, not even Valentine’s Day sob fest with a bottle of wine and ice cream (age no bar).
The film kicks off with the sisters travelling to Seoul with their father and his girlfriend to reconnect with their late mother and her roots. Taking poses and finding love locks on bridges feel like just an excuse to add glamour to the shoot locations, adding nothing to the plot. So, when LJ confides in her boyfriend, “They come up to me speaking in Korean. They see me and they think I understand but when I don’t I feel like I don’t belong”, it forms just another loose thread that had to be incorporated to make the minimum duration of a film.
LJ and Peter are basking in their romance, watching rom-coms on the couch (Can we retire ‘John Cusack holding a boombox over his head in Say Anything’ references already?) and sneaking kisses in between classes, dreaming of going to Stanford together where a life of domestic bliss awaits. LJ’s hyper-active imagination watching her future unfold in front of her eyes is the only part that garners a chuckle in this 109-minutes-long walkthrough blah-dom. The only problem that the happy couple encounter is LJ’s rejection from the college — a piece of information she takes all of 20 minutes of screen time to convey to her beau. By this point in the film, we have understood that entering this love festival consciously wasn’t perhaps the best choice.
The second hurdle on the path of their romance is the lack of a defining song that they can call ‘theirs’. So when Lara Jean discovers a song that seems to be a perfect fit, it’s at an NYU party that she has happened to crash, she is really marking her new love for New York. So it’s no surprise that her heart is broken as she has to choose between being an hour away from her romantic future at UC Berkeley or being 3,000 miles away on the East Coast where she feels like she could belong. While we desperately want to believe that two teenagers so in love might just make it by virtue of being PK + LJ but we are intimated to keep our hopes low, as an NYU grad student tells Lara “I had someone I totally wanted to go to college with too (but) I visited NYU and fell in love with this city”. Can you blame her really? While we wouldn’t advise you to watch this third instalment, as it might turn out to be more boring than your love life if you happen to be single, we know you probably will dip your toes in, just for old times’ sake. Don’t say you weren’t forewarned.
