Time to make a bit of a correction by addressing a film that I probably should’ve covered earlier. And no, I’m not just talking about this film specifically; I’m talking about the original as well. The first Kissing Booth blew past my radar back in 2018, and I didn’t see much reason to cover it at the time… but with how much Wattpad is shaping up to be the driving force for the next wave of YA adaptations, and that predates After in that trend, I figured it’d help to get that into my working history of the trend. And man, is it lucky I didn’t cover it the year it came out, as it can fit snugly between Venom and Gotti on my worst films of the year list. And honestly, it’s a bit of a toss-up whether this sequel is worse.
One of the big things that makes the first Kissing Booth so painful is its approach to teenaged romance… and how skeevy it is. I’ve seen it labelled as misogynistic, but quite frankly, it treats both men and women with the same lecherous, ‘slab of meat’ perspective, something made squickier by the age gap between the characters and the grown-ass director of the first film and this follow-up. At least Cuties had framing and context to fall back on with its imagery; just sayin’. And sure enough, the same applies here, albeit dampened slightly, giving the film a weird 365 Days-esque sheen of lust that makes the romances involved difficult to gel with.
Then again, that would likely be the case regardless of the framing because these are some of the most loathsome relationships I’ve ever covered on this blog, both between romantic partners and between so-called ‘friends’. The charisma between the actors is admittedly pretty solid (even if I once again have to lament seeing Joey King stoop to performing a script this subpar, a la Wish Upon and Slender Man), but with all the manipulation and passive-aggression that passes for interaction here, it’s hard to care about whether any of these emotionally-stunted cretins will be happy with each other. I know that this is something of a cliché with rom-coms, but if any of the lead characters here were capable of honest and open communication with each other, more than half of the film’s plot wouldn’t have even happened.
And speaking of cliches, I almost feel the need to congratulate co-writers Vince Marcello and Jay Arnold for crafting this Pogo remix of shitty rom-com tropes, some of which I don’t think have ever been used as sincerely as they are here. Some are recycled from the first film, like a gag where a character unknowingly reveals something embarrassing over an intercom, but then there’s shit like the other intercom gag that’s basically the ‘yes or no; tick a box’ schoolyard note meme played straight, dude-bro acoustic guitar session next to a fire on the beach (not every day this statement makes sense, but Adam Sandler did it better), and even a finale where the lead runs through an airport. Between all that nonsense and the repeated quoting of Audrey Hepburn, this somehow managed to annoy me even more than After through its sheer laziness.
To make things even worse, it takes about 20 minutes before the realisation kicks in that this is a story that absolutely, positively, does not need to be over two hours long. The love triangle shit is just a bad remake of the first film, compounding the fact that ‘pick between your best friend and your girlfriend’ is yet another tired cliché that didn’t even need the first go-through, the titular Kissing Booth plays out exactly the same as last time, and I don’t know about anyone else, but seeing Elle stress over a Dance Dance competition so she can win enough money to go to Harvard is one of the most ‘first world problems’-ass plot points I’ve seen in years. It’s already tough enough trying to relate to these people without adding hurdles to the track.
If the first Kissing Booth is the visual and aural equivalent of a diabetic coma, with the director hoping an overdose of SoCal sunshine would excuse everything wrong with the content, this film is the days-long migraine after managing to wake up from it. It reverberates a lot of what sucked about the first film, amplifies it in some cases, and even finds whole new ways to make me think that I could’ve spent my time better by doing literally anything else. With how much it embraces every little cliché and every possible bad decision one could make with a romance story, maybe this could be an After We Collided-style pick for bad movie night. But that’d have to be someone else’s pick, as I’m way too pissed off to ever consider watching this again. Pray for me when Kissing Booth 3 comes out next year.
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