To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before
★★★ 1/2
To All the Boys I've Loved Before succeeds in its simplicity. Lara Jean's (Lana Condor) unsent love letters are the MacGuffin for an absurd, yet plausible, teen romance with an extremely likable cast. It's a pleasure to see that Lara Jean is a female lead that is a fleshed out character. She is quiet and reserved, but all of her actions, both awkward and confident, are all earned because her tough decisions make sense. As different as Lara Jean and unexpected crush Peter (Noah Centineo) are from one another, their developed relationship clicks and is complicated in all the ways that high school romances tend to get.
There was a time where the rom-com genre died and the Gen Z generation took this "fresh" take and revived the genre for the streaming world. This movie owes a lot to the great rom-coms before it because its borrowed beats aren't revolutionary or surprising. But it knows its audience and it's not trying to reinvent the genre. It focuses on realistic and genuine moments, and it's when the characters are simply talking to each other when Jenny Han's source material shines. Does this film inspire me to watch the two other sequels? No, but just as Gen Z probably watched the other installments as soon as they came out, I would have done the same thing if there was a sequel made to Can't Hardly Wait a couple of years after its initial release.
