LONDON: The first “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” movie quickly became a cornerstone of Netflix’s push to reinvigorate the saccharine teen rom com genre. What’s more, it made overnight stars of its two leads — Lana Condor as Lara Jean and Noah Centineo as Peter Kavinsky — and marked Netflix out as a studio that can (when it wants to) turn tried-and-tested genre tropes on their head. Two films later, and the LJ-PK love story gets an apparent curtain downer in “To All the Boys: Always and Forever” which, thankfully, continues to subvert expectations.
Lara Jean and Peter plan to go to college together in California, before glimpses of a life in New York turn LJ’s head and force the couple to reassess their future plans. In essence, that’s all the plot complexity that’s really needed to kickstart a couple of hours of borderline-meta teenage angst exploration, but it’s nice to see director Michael Fimognari (returning from the slightly more formulaic and predictable second installment, “To All the Boys: PS I Love You”) sidestep some of the more problematic cliches. So, while there’s the usual smattering of relationship hiccups born of little more than simple miscommunication, both LJ and Peter act with self-awareness and empathy (with credit due to Condor and Centineo for maintaining their believable on-screen chemistry) befitting of young adults embarking on the formative parts of their lives — and their relationship.
The first movie in the series had surprise on its side, and while this installment doesn’t deliver quite the same punch for audiences already rooting for the central couple — the ‘peril’ their relationship is subjected to feels more like plot-driving impetus than genuine breakup threat — is still has the kind of storytelling smarts that raise this above much of the rom com miasma. Couple that with leads blessed with genuine charisma and it’s an engaging, albeit not unexpected, recipe for success.
