I am not a huge fan of traditional romance movies. I always find it more meaningful when there is something tragic that the two have to overcome. While this is true, I was a fan of the first “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” film. Lana Condor is gorgeous, and she fantastically played the role of an awkward teenage girl. The first movie had a kind of spark that the two following it did not have. The fake-dating trope is nothing new, but Condor and Noah Centineo carried the movie with their on-screen chemistry. That paired with how fun and cheeky the film was overall [qualify]. Fast forward to this year, we are given the final film of the movie series titled “To All the Boys: Always and Forever, Lara Jean.”

I was already biased going into this film as I had a feeling that it was going to be very mushy and romantic considering it was released around Valentine’s Day. However, I was not prepared for one of the most boring two hours of my life. 

The movie begins in South Korea where Lara Jean and the rest of her family are staying for vacation over spring break. As someone who enjoys K-pop and Korean culture, I thought the music choices in the beginning really grabbed my attention. They were very notably successful and popular songs in the Korean pop industry, such as Girls’ Generation’s “Gee”, and that made me really excited for the movie at the start.

Music choice, to me, can really make or break a movie. While the music was nothing special, it was recognizable and fun to jam out to while watching the compilation of Lara Jean and her family in Korea. However, the music does not make up for the lack of Asian portrayal Lara Jean should have had in these scenes. She briefly touches on the fact that she feels out of place in Korea when a native Korean walks up to her and begins to speak in the language, assuming that she can speak it. She has this conversation with her boyfriend, Peter, and it just seems very rushed and brushed over. I thought it was weird to try to have this dynamic and internal cultural struggle only to shut it down after three minutes and never bring it up again in the film. It is the third film and not the main focus of it, but why bring it up in the first place?

After returning from Korea, Lara Jean and Peter talk about their future plans to go to Stanford together after graduating. They had been planning this for a while now in hopes that they could continue their relationship without having to do long distances. However, only a few scenes later when the Stanford decisions are announced, Lara Jean finds out that she did not get in. This is where the plot kind of starts to get interesting. She has to now come up with a solution to the problem which involves simply going to another college that is not too far from Stanford. I think this is when I started to get bored of the movie. She cries about not being able to go to Stanford with him for about five minutes and then it is quickly resolved, leaving the audience wondering what the next plot will be.

Apparently, the school is taking a trip to New York, I am assuming for the seniors as a class road trip, and Lara Jean brings up the fact that she applied to New York University(NYU), because her older sister, Margot, told her to do so. Her sister, who is arguably the one with the most logic in the family, tells her to look for schools outside of the ones closest to Peter, and obviously, as a teenager in love, she does not want to take this advice.