Y’know, at the fourth film in, I was honestly expecting the bottom to drop out of this series. Even with how well the After films have been doing at getting increasingly worse, yet increasingly more fun to watch, with each instalment, I thought it would get to a point where the melodrama couldn’t be pushed any harder and we’d start seeing diminishing returns. I mean, even with film series I like for reasons beyond laughing at their expense, it’s rare to see one last this long and still maintain that key engagement factor. And for a little while, it indeed looked like this was where things would start petering out. But then it decided to floor it into a brick wall and further the series trajectory to unleash what is, somehow, the new worst and new funniest entry in the series.
What a curious little series this has turned into. The first film is still a garbage fire behind a gasoline refinery, but past that point, these films have basically turned into everything I wanted out of the Fifty Shades series: Silly, phenomenally stupid, but almost endearing in their asininity and willingness to entertain on those terms. And as the third of a proposed four (possibly five) film series, After We Fell is more of the same unhealthy junk food that came before, only it’s lacking in even the most basic of narrative fibre by this point.
