To All the Boys: Always and Forever | Review

The teen romance sequel To All the Boys: Always and Forever is a decided comedown in quality when placed along its two genuinely charming predecessors. It’s not that To All the Boys: Always and Forever is outright terrible – far from it – but rather that it’s missing the comedic, emotional, and romantic spark of the first two adaptations of author Jenny Han’s works. There’s still a fair bit to like here, but this time out things are a lot more uneven, choppy, and seemingly slapped together in a bid to make a sequel that doesn’t challenge or tax its viewers too strenuously or beyond the obvious. There’s a great, multi-layered Say Anything-esque story waiting to break out of To All the Boys: Always and Forever, but sadly, this isn’t that great of a movie.

Protagonist Lara Jean (Lana Condor) is still happily in love with Peter (Noah Centineo) as their senior year of high school is winding down. After spending some time with her family in Seoul – where her late mother was originally from – Lara Jean looks forward to the senior class trip to New York City, the prom, and going off to Stanford in the fall alongside Peter. Lara Jean’s carefully plotted and much daydreamed future with Peter hits a snag when she doesn’t get accepted to her boyfriend’s chosen school. She does get accepted to Berkeley, which is roughly an hour away by car, and things look like they’ll work out in the end, but a new love in her life arrives. During the trip to New York, Lara Jean falls in love with all of the possibilities and experiences that big city life could bring. Instead of choosing between two boys, this time Lara Jean is forced into deciding between sticking close to her love or doing what might be best for her future.

Shot back to back with its predecessor, To All the Boys: Always and Forever feels every bit like the entry that got a lot less love in the editing room and at the scripting stage. New screenwriter Katie Lovejoy seems to have a pretty solid handle on what made Lara Jean such an easily relatable and complicated heroine in the first two outings, but returning helmer Michael Fimognari (who directed the second film and has served as cinematographer for all three entries) seems to have a much shorter leash this time out. It’s clear that at some point during production of To All the Boys: Always and Forever, the filmmaking team was told that they can’t make the third film in the franchise into something of epic length, because it feels and looks like a story that has bitten off far more than it can chew.

At nearly two full hours, To All the Boys: Always and Forever does feel a bit long in the tooth, but it also comes across as a story that needs more time and space to tell it. In the early going, when Lara Jean is sightseeing in Korea with her father (John Corbett) and smarty-pants younger sister, Kitty (up and coming Canadian performer Anna Cathcart, who remains a big standout), many moments feel awkwardly truncated; like they keep going on for a few seconds more than they should before suddenly ending. There are many instances of this editorial awkwardness throughout To All the Boys: Always and Forever, including one of the worst “heart-to-heart” scenes I have ever seen, where it’s painfully obvious that the two actors talking to one another clearly aren’t in the same place at the same time (or that there were so many takes of the scene that it became impossible to coherently assemble).

To All the Boys: Always and Forever is meant to be a send off to these characters, and as such, there are too many subplots going around for a single film to handle them all. Dad is about to get remarried to a pretty nice woman (an underused Sarayu Blue). Lara Jean’s once fractured circle of friends is slowly mending. Peter’s absentee father (Henry Thomas) suddenly comes back into his son’s life, raising a lot of questions for the young man. Some of these threads are interesting, but they’re treated like afterthoughts in comparison to the “will she or won’t she” question at the heart of To All the Boys: Always and Forever. Whenever a new problem is introduced, it doesn’t take long for the film to resolve it as neatly as possible, and sometimes just drops things without any explanation whatsoever. Whenever it seems like this third and final film in the series is about to take things in a more interesting direction, the reset button is hit, and the focus is placed on a question that ends up getting repetitive and run into the ground before too long.

There’s still a great deal of cheerfulness and lightly tear-jerking tendencies throughout To All the Boys: Always and Forever, but it’s less effective this time out because the viewer is almost forced into focusing on the same issue over and over again, leaving a lot of potentially interesting stuff flapping in the breezy teen romance and its relentless soundtrack of poppy hits. It all feels rushed and simplified in comparison to the other entries. Thankfully the cast works exceptionally well with one another, especially the measured and wholly believable chemistry between Condor and Centineo. The actors and their performances feel relaxed in a good way. They keep To All the Boys: Always and Forever inviting and loose, as do some keen stylistic choices from Fimognari (especially a nifty line drawing motif). It’s almost, but not quite enough to distract from the fact that this franchise is going out with more of a shrug than a bang.

To All the Boys: Always and Forever is available to stream on Netflix starting Friday, February 12, 2021.