Its here that The Kissing Booth 2 tiptoes into pure absurdism, as Shelley and Lee try their hand at competitive Dance Dance Revolution. Director Vince Marcello, returning from the first film Negative 2. The film does something unexpectedly audacious with its last few moments, making me wonder if there's at least a little nutrition in cloying fluff. With its extended montages of road trips, summer bucket lists, flash mobs, water park shenanigans, and elaborate go-kart races, The Kissing Booth 3 doesn't so much resemble a Quirkyromcom has strong language, teen drinking, sex. Read Common Sense Media's The Kissing Booth review, age rating, and parents guide. TheKissing Booth 3 | Official Trailer | Netflix. Watch on. Marco (Taylor Perez) shows up to undo much of the likeable persona the last movie built around him, and serves mostly as a catalyst for Iknow this is sad for fans of the film series to hear, but Netflix's teen romcom trilogy The Kissing Booth came to an end on August 11, 2021 with the release of the third and final film, The Vay Tiền Nhanh Ggads. These questions and more are unceremoniously wrapped up in the final entry to its namesake saga, “The Kissing Booth 3.” To Marcello and and co-writer Jay S. Arnold’s credit, there are a handful of surprises that defy some of the more expected youthful rom-com tropes. But the rest is a lot of the same teenage romantic tribulations we’ve seen before. If “The Kissing Booth 2” was overstuffed with high school drama, its successor reaches to make the most of old tensions over the summer break. Noah is once again threatened by Marco, and Lee is once again acting like a child because his best friend, who is also holding down a job and taking care of her young brother, isn’t paying enough attention to him. It’s so tiresome, that when Elle finally stands up for herself, it’s an all-too-brief reprieve from the boys’ antics. More tiresome are some of the shenanigans that these Gen Z kids get into. The annoying list of friendship rules are back with an addendum a list of random summer activities essentially cooked up by Elle to make Lee happy. For reasons I cannot explain, this includes a contest to see who can drink the most frozen drinks the fastest and survive the ensuing brain freeze, a helium-induced karaoke number that somehow brings the house down, and orchestrating a choreographed flash mob, which feels like a blast from the past decade—which could be said for many of the movie’s needle-drops. The only set piece that manages to be more creative than exhausting is a go-kart race based on the video game "Mario Kart," but only if you’re alright with the fact the kids, as they do in the game, throw items to make their competitors crash. Gentlemen, learning a TikTok dance was right there. King, who normally tries her best to sell Elle’s growing pains of young love, looks a little more checked out this time. She's left behind the wide-eyed optimism of the previous chapters for an Elle who seems so tired by it all, she can do little more than cry or snap at the new woman dating her dad. Elordi’s cool hot boyfriend shtick also seems similarly tired. His character’s macho posturing is less about connecting with Elle than being too insecure with her. Courtney seems to be the only one fully committed to his character, which unfortunately, doesn’t seem to have matured much from when he first protested over his best friend dating his brother. Even perennial scene saver Molly Ringwald, as the boys’ mother Mrs. Flynn, isn’t around for most of the movie to smooth over ruffled feathers and bruised egos. It’s hard to believe the cinematography of these movies could get worse, but believe me, it does. Likely due to the pandemic or a tight schedule, a number of close-ups of Elle, Lee, and Noah clearly have green-screened backgrounds, looking about as unnatural as many things in the story. There’s one climatic showdown, set in front of the Hollywood Hills sign, that really defies any sort of reason. It’s not so much spectacle or camp, it's just silly. For this last go-around, Marcello committed to the series’ cheaply saccharine premise and only half-heartedly tried to make it look better than an old Aéropostale from the aughts, focusing his camera on mostly white young people except for Marco and Chloe against the backdrop of a coastal sun-soaked California. “The Kissing Booth 3” has about as much depth as one of those ads. After the sand has been shaken out of shoes and final smiles have been pointed at the camera, there’s not really much more to the movie. Just a boy, a girl, and the looks they trade with each other. On Netflix today. Monica Castillo Monica Castillo is a freelance writer and University of Southern California Annenberg graduate film critic fellow. Although she originally went to Boston University for biochemistry and molecular biology before landing in the sociology department, she went on to review films for The Boston Phoenix, WBUR, Dig Boston, The Boston Globe, and co-hosted the podcast “Cinema Fix.” Now playing Film Credits The Kissing Booth 3 2021 Rated NR 111 minutes Latest blog posts about 3 hours ago about 6 hours ago about 7 hours ago 1 day ago Comments Netflix Release Date Streaming May 11, 2018 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION tbd No score yet based on 3 Critic Reviews Awaiting 1 more review Stream On Critic Reviews By MetascoreBy User Score How many movies does it take to tell a story about high school senior Elle Evans Joey King trying to decide whether to honor her friendship to lifelong bestie Lee Joel Courtney or break the “rules” by dating his smoking-hot older brother, Noah Jacob Elordi? If you’re Netflix — the content factory that milked “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” for its full trilogy potential — then the answer is three, obviously. Except the makers of “The Kissing Booth” didn’t have a solid book series to fall back on young author Beth Reekles was 15 when she wrote the original, and the sequels have been afterthoughts, nor a compelling romantic rivalry to stretch across multiple movies. What they did have was the data to suggest audiences wanted more. I too wanted more — less of the same, but a little substance for a change. How great would it be if Elle found enough self-respect to pursue her own dreams, rather than deciding her future according to which of the Flynn bros’ hearts she least wanted to break? Spoiler alert “The Kissing Booth 3” offers some of both — that is, there’s plenty of fan service including a whole new list for Elle and Lee to exhaust, but also a late-arriving sense of identity that gives this junk-food sequel just enough nutritional value to help its young audiences reconsider how to determine their own post-high school priorities. Last time we saw Elle, she had been accepted to two universities UC Berkeley, which she and Lee had always planned to attend, or Harvard, where Noah suggests they get an apartment together. You don’t have to be a geography major to recognize that these two schools are on opposite sides of the country. And speaking of majors, what is it that Elle wants to do with her life anyway? She’s vaguely described as “brilliant” in the series which director Vince Marcello has overseen since the beginning, maintaining a consistently chipper, Disney Channel vibe. But what does that mean? The short answer It means that she ought to have more than snogging Noah to look forward to in her life, and though this franchise may have been conceived as a naive teen fantasy, it’s not too late to give the character some dimension. Mind you, that’s all packed into the last half-hour of a movie that remains stubbornly content to trade in worn-out teen-movie clichés, as Elle finds herself mixed up in one petty misunderstanding after another. After doing the single-dad thing for half a dozen years, Mr. Evans Stephen Jennings — who was barely a character in the previous movies — is trying to start another relationship of his own, but Elle is too self-absorbed to give the woman Bianca Amato a chance. Then again, she has her hands full, having to get a summer job, take care of her younger brother Carson White, etc. It’s the summer before she and Lee are supposed to head off to college, and Mrs. Flynn Molly Ringwald, whose own YA hits millennials would do well to investigate has decided to sell the beach house. The “kids” convince her to let them fix it up over the summer, although no one’s fooled They’ve just been handed the keys to the ultimate party pad, and the movie is too basic to engage with any of the ways that might go wrong. One of Noah’s old crushes Maisie Richardson-Sellers crashes with them, causing Elle to get jealous. She reciprocates by striking things back up with Marco Taylor Zakhar Perez, the boy she kissed in front of Noah in the previous movie. Are we really worried that either of these rivals will upset the couple? This movie has all the complexity of a shampoo commercial. Before the brothers go their separate ways, the close-knit trio is determined to make this the most memorable summer ever — which is a recipe for “The Kissing Booth 3” to cram in everything from skydiving to sumo wrestling all to-do items on the Bucket Beach List that Elle unearths in an old Mario Kart lunchbox. The flash mob and cosplay racing scenes are memorable, but the rest is reduced to montage as the movie essentially acknowledges that these recent grads are peaking before their lives have even begun. With all that fun out of the way, the characters start behaving like adults in the film’s final stretch The pressure’s on for everyone involved to tie things up well, and even if all that’s come before feels generic keep in mind that tweens haven’t necessarily seen the bajillion other TV series and movies Marcello and company so shamelessly recycle, what really matters here is how the “Kissing Booth” movies will end, since that’s what fans will remember. Here, Orson Welles’ adage comes in handy “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” “The Kissing Booth 3” could have gone out on a conventional romantic note — say, ending on a kiss — as if to suggest Elle and Noah who have all the chemistry of a pair of telethon co-hosts will grow old and gray together. Instead, the film leaves things surprisingly uncertain, while inventing for Elle a whole list of ambitions that hadn’t even been hinted at until this point. Then it skips forward six years till everyone’s out of school, revealing Elle so transformed that I half-wish the film had been about those intervening years, in which she develops a personality. But maybe it’s enough to know that she eventually managed to find one. “Alright, let’s do this thing! Again!” It’s not always the most encouraging sign for a character to yell this line in a sequel, but here we go again. “The Kissing Booth” is back with a similar premise of troubled young love but with some new twists and a few new characters. Elle Joey King and Lee Joel Courtney have thankfully repaired their tight knit friendship in time for their senior year, until Lee’s girlfriend, Rachel Meganne Young, grows tired of Elle’s constant presence in his life. Elle clings to her best friend for company as long distance begins taking its toll on her relationship with Noah Jacob Elordi, now a newly minted Harvard hunk studying across the country from their idyllic upscale homes and the posh prep school where they met. In the original movie, Elle made Lee choose whether to accept her relationship with his brother, Noah, or reject it and end their friendship. Now, it’s Elle who has to choose whether to follow Lee to their mothers’ alma mater at UC Berkeley or find a school in Boston so she can join Noah. But what’s high school and first love without heaps of drama? Adding to Elle’s worries is Noah’s new college buddy, Chloe Maisie Richardson-Sellers, a statuesque threat who seems to be getting too close to her guy. Back at school, Elle and Lee are once again in charge of the film’s namesake kissing booth, with admittedly much less fanfare this time. Their challenge this year is to find the next hot guy on campus to help them sell tickets, but the suave, singer-guitar player and dancer Marco Taylor Zakhar Perez, like Noah before him, isn’t keen on the idea at first. In some senses, this teen romantic comedy has it all betrayal, jealousy, mean girls, public apologies, a video game-dance competition, a heated Thanksgiving meltdown, both romantic and sad montages set to slow pop songs. You name it. But “The Kissing Booth 2” is also fairly empty, predictable and just downright silly; a movie about cookie cutter characters in contrived situations set in a make-believe world. For some, the film will play like an escapist fantasy, maybe even a nostalgic trip back to when the biggest thing you worried about was where you were going to college in the fall. Other viewers may find its artificial sweetness and simplicity off-putting. It’s just where this movie exists, and it may not be to everyone’s liking. With most of the young cast’s performances hovering around hyperactive levels, the rare appearance of a parental figure like Lee and Noah’s mom Molly Ringwald is a welcome change of pace. King, to her credit, goes all in on the role of a hopeless romantic. Maybe it’s too much at times, like when she swoons over a workout video of Marco that’s accidentally broadcast to the whole school, or when she competes against Marco on the Dance Dance Revolution-like dance game to get him to do a dance contest with her. It’s not necessary to remember every detail of “The Kissing Booth” or know much about the book series by Beth Reekles that inspired the movies, since the sequel begins with a recap to explain some of the tensions already in play. Thankfully, there’s less creepy behavior towards Elle in this sequel. Vince Marcello, who directed and co-wrote “The Kissing Booth 2” with Jay S. Arnold, stuffs about a TV season’s worth of drama into the film’s overblown runtime. Most problems in the story could be resolved with a simple conversation, but of course, the characters are scared to talk things out, so problems repeat themselves until they hit a breaking point. “The Kissing Booth 2” is made up of what it thinks preteens might like in a film about high schoolers, although some outdated references and situations seem a bit out of step with what Gen Z are into. Speaking of which, for the most diverse generation of Americans, “The Kissing Booth 2” still looks homogeneously white except for a few background extras. The two supporting characters of color, Marco and Chloe, are both seen as competition by Elle at different points in the story and it feels a little uncomfortable to see her so threatened by their mere existence. Because there’s an easy explanation for everything in “The Kissing Booth” universe, no grudge or feud gets too serious or lasts too long. The best that I can say for “The Kissing Booth 2” is that it’s largely inoffensive fluff, easy enough to follow even if you haven’t seen the original. Its uncomplicated outlook extends to Anastas N. Michos’ cinematography, where there’s often a faint glow reflecting the warm California sun during the scenes and a chilly grey hovering over those in Boston. You can soak in the movie’s basic premise and overacting just as long as you know this pool’s shallow. Now available on Netflix. Monica Castillo Monica Castillo is a freelance writer and University of Southern California Annenberg graduate film critic fellow. Although she originally went to Boston University for biochemistry and molecular biology before landing in the sociology department, she went on to review films for The Boston Phoenix, WBUR, Dig Boston, The Boston Globe, and co-hosted the podcast “Cinema Fix.” Now playing Film Credits The Kissing Booth 2 2020 Rated NR 130 minutes Latest blog posts about 7 hours ago about 10 hours ago about 10 hours ago 1 day ago Comments Cast & crewUser reviewsTrivia2018TV-141h 45mA high school student is forced to confront her secret crush at a kissing high school student is forced to confront her secret crush at a kissing high school student is forced to confront her secret crush at a kissing production, box office & company infoVideos5Jacob Elordi Receives the IMDb STARmeter AwardMore like thisReview CreepyIt's as if the Hallmark channel tried to make an R rated movie while keeping it 7, 2018Contribute to this pageSuggest an edit or add missing contentEdit pageMore to explore

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