Review: ‘The Kissing Booth 3’ is Thankfully the Last One

As I said in my review of the second film, I do not like the Kissing Booth trilogy despite my unashamed love for teen comedy films. What I’ve really disliked about Vince Marcello’s first two attempts at “filmmaking” (a term I have always used very lightly with regards to him) is how shallowly Marcello portrays everything – both the actual relationships between characters and the so-called “deeper meanings” behind the plot, characters, and actions. What the first two films did have was viewership: the Netflix user data (obtained via totally legal methods) shows that audiences wanted more.

I, too, wanted more from this, because I am a masochist who loves watching bad movies, but I also wanted Marcello to improve upon the few redeeming qualities of the sequel, as they showed some potential to make the final installment decent. Based on the sequel, for example, it would have been great if Elle (Joey King) found enough self-advocacy and self-respect to pursue her own dreams rather than deciding her future according to whose heart she least wanted to break. Somehow, my prayers have been heard and The Kissing Booth 3 luckily offers some change to the formula of the first two films, including a whole new list for Elle and her platonic besite Lee (Joel Courtney) to exhaust, and a rather late sense of identity that makes it surpass the first two by just a little bit to help teenage audiences reconsider how to determine their own post-high school priorities.

The last time we saw Elle, it was March of her senior year, and she had been accepted to two universities: UC Berkeley, which she and Lee had always planned to attend, and Harvard, where her kind-of boyfriend Noah (Jacob Elordi) suggests they get an apartment together. You don’t have to be a U.S. collegiate geography expert to recognize these two schools are on opposite sides of the country. Aside from that, Elle does not know exactly what she wants to do with her life, despite being vaguely described as “brilliant” in the way of Disney Channel Original Movie characters. Elle is basing her entire angsty teenage life on which of the two boys pining for her she’d rather choose: Noah, or the music school-bound recent transfer student Marco (Taylor Zakhar Perez). Her “brilliance” must be underused, as she ought to have more than her naïve teen fantasies to look forward to in college, but alas, the film refuses to give her any dimension other than this face-value brilliance. The entire trilogy has been like this, and it still remains stubbornly content to trade character development and meaningful, relatable growth for worn-out teen-movie clichés, as Elle finds herself mixed up in one petty misunderstanding after another.

As in the second film, Elle’s love story fiasco isn’t the only narrative of the third. Just like The Kissing Booth 2‘s heartfelt scenes with one gay teenager confessing his love for another, the subplot substantially better than the main narrative, only this time it’s rather unexpected. Why unexpected? Because of the character it focuses on: after being a single dad for half a dozen years, Mr. Evans (Stephen Jennings), Elle’s “cool dad,” is hoping to start another relationship of his own, but Elle is too self-absorbed and misses her mom too much to give her potential future stepmom Linda (Bianca Amato) a chance, despite her desire to get along with her. Then again, she has her hands full, as she has to get a summer job and choose which college to go to, in addition to finishing up the school year. It’s the summer before she and Lee are supposed to head off to college, and Lee’s mom (the always iconic Molly Ringwald), a first-timer in this trilogy who not-so-surprisingly carries her scenes, has decided to sell the beach house. The “kids” (this is a debatable term, as no teenager I’ve ever met has a full-on arm tattoo) convince her to let them fix it up over the summer, although no one’s fooled: they’ve just been handed the keys to the ultimate party pad, and the movie predictably engages with any and all of the ways that might go wrong. Noah’s ex-girlfriend Chloe (Maisie Richardson-Sellers) crashes with them, causing Elle to get jealous, and she reciprocates by striking things back up with Marco, the boy she kissed in front of Noah in the previous movie. But it all feels pointless: are viewers really that worried that either of these rivals will upset the couple? This film has the complexity of a shampoo commercial, and it feels way longer than its 2-hour, 30-minute runtime because of how long these kinds of scenes drag on.

Before everyone goes their separate ways, the close-knit trio is determined to make this the most memorable summer ever — which is a recipe for The Kissing Booth 3 to cram in everything a teenager would want to do, from indoor skydiving to The Office-style inflatable sumo wrestling, all to-do items on the final Bucket List, which was unearthed by Elle in an old Mario lunchbox. The flash mob and cosplay racing scenes are pretty fun and memorable, but the rest is reduced to a montage as the movie is essentially acknowledging that these high schoolers are peaking before their lives have even begun. With all the fun out of the way, the characters start behaving like adults in the film’s final stretch: the pressure’s on for everyone involved to tie things up well, and even if all that’s come before feels generic (keep in mind that a lot of today’s teens haven’t necessarily seen the bajillion other TV series and movies that are so obviously recycled in this trilogy), what really matters here is how the Kissing Booth movies will end, since that’s what real fans and ironic “fans” (like me) alike will remember. Here, Orson Welles’ adage comes in handy: “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”

The Kissing Booth 3 could have gone out on a conventional romantic note — say, ending on a kiss — as if to suggest that Elle and Noah will grow old and gray together. Instead, the film leaves things frustratingly uncertain, inventing a whole new list of college ambitions for Elle that hadn’t even been hinted at until now. And then? It skips forward six years to a high school reunion, revealing a career-chasing Elle who is so transformed that I wish they made a film had been about those intervening years, in which she goes to college and develops a personality. But maybe it’s enough to know that she eventually managed to find one.

The final installment in this dreaded trilogy has about as much depth as a river in a heat wave, but isn’t really as hateable as the other two. I had points where I almost genuinely enjoyed it despite its length and insufferable main character. I even developed, dare I say it, empathy for some of the characters, even Elle, at some of the more distressing points. It’s not all bad, too – aside from the scenes I had genuine laughs at, the message of trusting yourself and doing what you love is something that resonates more with me, especially as Elle grew a spine. Maybe, just maybe, I treated these films too harshly, and they will go on to become cult films in the future.

1.5/5 STARS