

Just like The Kissing Booth 2‘s heartfelt scenes with one gay teenager confessing his love for another, the subplot substantially better than the main narrative, only this time it’s rather unexpected. The entire trilogy has been like this, and it still remains stubbornly content to trade character development and meaningful, relatable growth for worn-out teen-movie clichés, as Elle finds herself mixed up in one petty misunderstanding after another.Īs in the second film, Elle’s love story fiasco isn’t the only narrative of the third. Her “brilliance” must be underused, as she ought to have more than her naïve teen fantasies to look forward to in college, but alas, the film refuses to give her any dimension other than this face-value brilliance.

Elle is basing her entire angsty teenage life on which of the two boys pining for her she’d rather choose: Noah, or the music school-bound recent transfer student Marco (Taylor Zakhar Perez).
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Aside from that, Elle does not know exactly what she wants to do with her life, despite being vaguely described as “brilliant” in the way of Disney Channel Original Movie characters. collegiate geography expert to recognize these two schools are on opposite sides of the country. The last time we saw Elle, it was March of her senior year, and she had been accepted to two universities: UC Berkeley, which she and Lee had always planned to attend, and Harvard, where her kind-of boyfriend Noah (Jacob Elordi) suggests they get an apartment together.
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Somehow, my prayers have been heard and The Kissing Booth 3 luckily offers some change to the formula of the first two films, including a whole new list for Elle and her platonic besite Lee (Joel Courtney) to exhaust, and a rather late sense of identity that makes it surpass the first two by just a little bit to help teenage audiences reconsider how to determine their own post-high school priorities. Based on the sequel, for example, it would have been great if Elle (Joey King) found enough self-advocacy and self-respect to pursue her own dreams rather than deciding her future according to whose heart she least wanted to break.

I, too, wanted more from this, because I am a masochist who loves watching bad movies, but I also wanted Marcello to improve upon the few redeeming qualities of the sequel, as they showed some potential to make the final installment decent. What the first two films did have was viewership: the Netflix user data (obtained via totally legal methods) shows that audiences wanted more.

What I’ve really disliked about Vince Marcello’s first two attempts at “filmmaking” (a term I have always used very lightly with regards to him) is how shallowly Marcello portrays everything – both the actual relationships between characters and the so-called “deeper meanings” behind the plot, characters, and actions. As I said in my review of the second film, I do not like the Kissing Booth trilogy despite my unashamed love for teen comedy films.
