In a plethora of teen rom-com movies, Vince Marcello's 2018 movie stands out for being an outright problematic movie.
Netflix is home to many teen romantic-comedy movies with some of them being good while most of them bad. One of the many films in Netflix's catalog of films is this 2018 Vince Marcello's movie starring Joey King which promises a cute love story but ended up being ugly.
“The Kissing Booth” is about Elle Evans (Joey King) whose relationship with his best friend Lee Flynn (Joel Courtney) is put in jeopardy when she fell in love with his older brother, Noah (Jacob Elordi). Things got more complicated after Noah kisses Elle at the school’s kissing booth in front of the whole school.
“The Kissing Booth” falls into the bottomless pit of bad Netflix’s original films. For some reason, this movie overly sexualizes its characters and confine them in stereotypes making them all look like cardboard people. The story also romanticized abuse and male chauvinism. Sadly, the women in this movie are limited to only objects of desire and not at all intellectual beings capable of standing up and making decisions.
This movie is an outright groaner. It might’ve been a Wattpad story made by a teenage girl, but it’s apparent that the point of “The Kissing Booth” is for Vince Marcello to connect to a younger audience. Which he miserably botched. Even more so, the movie is very formulaic. It kisses all the tropes it can find in the rom-com making textbook to a point that the characters in this movie start to look unreal. Also, the script is terrible and unoriginal. Kudos to our trio of leads who did their best with what they have.
In summary, I do not recommend you to watch “The Kissing Booth” because, honestly, there is no lesson to learn from its narrative. The characters are unlikable, uninspiring, and toxic, and the story is bland. There is no redeeming this atrocious movie.
0.5/5
