Time to get back on the Wattpad train and round off the Netflix trilogy of teenaged rom-coms that rank up there with the roughest movie-watching experiences I can recall since this blog began. I’ve gotten well past the point of thinking that it just doesn’t work for me because I’m not in the intended demographic. These are bad movies, and while I can accept that there’s an ample market for switch-brain-off trash on streaming sites (considering the numbers this series has been doing on Netflix alongside 365 Days), nothing about this series thus far has appealed to my cult film perspective. But hey, After We Collided managed to be a reasonably enjoyable irony sit (and yes, I will be getting to that film’s sequel soon), so maybe this series will go out with an easier ride than what led up to it. Well, it kinda does, but it’s mostly the same shit with a different number on the end of it.
I thankfully won’t have to spend as long talking about rom-com cliches with this one as, while there are still plenty of them to be found here, the plot itself doesn’t give nearly as many of them room to breathe. Instead of the high school setting, the bulk of the film takes place in an upscale beach house that all of the main characters are living in over the summer before they all go to college. And in that scenery shift, we reach our first real problem: All of the ‘first world problems’ vibes I got from the second film are amplified here to give the utmost impression of privilege. There are no real dilemmas to be found here, save for Elle struggling to decide which Ivy League school she should go to and deciding whether or not said beach house should be sold off.
A good amount of the film’s “plot” is self-admitted fluff, with Elle, Lee, and Noah ticking off items on a bucket list Elle and Lee wrote up as children, pulling pranks and going go-karting and the like. It’s all meant to put us next to the characters, maybe catching a contact high on how much fun they’re having so that we are having fun, but there’s a big problem with that: I don’t care for any of these characters. There is nothing about the self-centred, manipulative, petulantly immature and perfectly oblivious things they keep saying and doing to each other that makes me give a damn if they’re having fun. The actors, Dude bless them, are trying to give this script some form of energy and likeability through their performances, but the damage has been done over the last two films, and for the entry with the least actually happening in it, it’s too little too late.
Even if these characters were made more palatable here, the way the romances and other relationships are arranged is still miles behind what is acceptable. I could go on a massive rant about how this film treats long-distance relationships like a death sentence (in a film released during a time when long-distance socialising became a necessity… smart move(!)) and how that notion only exists to artificially ramp up the tension, or how the entire crux of the series about choosing between your best friend or your romantic interest is so basic that it didn’t need three movies devoted to it, or how contrived the writing is overall in getting these ciphers to be pissy with each other, up to and including breaking out a Monopoly board.
But instead, I’m going to bring up how embarrassingly self-serving this whole production is as it revolves around Elle and her non-issue of the day. By design, everything in this film comes easy for her, and whatever doesn’t is largely of her own doing, not because of any outside force because it’s all set up to be beneficial to her. The setting, the “problems most people would dream of having to deal with” nonsense to do with college and relationships, the cringe-inducing development where the film goes full Charmed and decides she hasn’t spent enough time thinking about herself (while the soundtrack chants “What I need” over and over again); it’s wish fulfilment so see-through that it’s actually quite distasteful. I understand there’s an appeal to this kind of story, something that can let the audience live vicariously through the lead character, but when said lead is this unappealing and borderline sociopathic… yeah, no thanks.
Surprise surprise, this finale to what I hope to Dude sticks to being a trilogy is every bit as irritating and lacking in structure as what came before. This is a story in the same way that a bowl of marshmallow fluff is a meal, and even for the self-conscious niche it exists in, it is so phenomenally unappealing that I can’t even give it credit as shallow wish fulfilment. Whatever mild praise I could give through my teeth about the relative lack of outright aggravation compared to the other two entries, I continue to hold back because at least things happened in those movies. This was created with the attitude that, three films in, whoever is still tuning in will sit through anything and so delivering the barest of bare minimums is perfectly fine because people will still watch it. There’s a special kind of hell reserved for creatives who think that lowly of their own audience.
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