The Kissing Booth — Blue Fairy Film Blog

I’m not going to mince words on this one: this was a grueling film watching experience and it has left me dazed. How, in this day and age, are we still allowing such obviously bad and irrelevant films to be made? I understand that there’s a book, and it’s very popular with teens, and this is one of Netflix’s biggest original films in terms of streaming, but seriously, what the hell is this? I knew, in my heart of hearts, that this would be a terrible experience, but the internet told me otherwise. Buzzfeed likened this to the honestly perfect film Set It Up, which is the first good romantic comedy to be released in the past three years! So, yet again, I believed that perhaps it wasn’t going to be the massive trainwreck I was expecting. Unfortunately, as always, I was let down hard; like landing face first on concrete, hard.

Every hacky trend was crammed into this monstrosity: the V.O. that explains why all the characters are super quirky, the forbidden love storyline, and the stereotypical high school archetypes. Much like the logic displayed in the 2003 film From Justin to Kelly, the reasons why our main characters do anything is vague. In that film a villain kept the two leads apart because...reasons? In this film the two romantic leads are Elle and Noah (King and Elordi) can’t be together because he’s her friend Lee’s (Courtney) brother. There isn’t really a reason for this other than a promise they made to one another when they were five, which says that you can’t date your friend’s relatives. This seemed like a very flimsy to me, (SPOILERS) so when it’s eventually revealed to the best friend that they’re together I expected it would be a blip in the story. Instead it breaks up their relationship, her friendship, and her ties to her own family.

Besides being awful because there’s no stable story, every aspect of the film reeks of misogyny, toxic masculinity, and slut shaming. This is the least feminist or female friendly film released since 2002’s Swept Away, a film that I have often stated is the worst film I have ever seen. In this film there is sex shaming, sexual harassment, and weird messaging about what it is to be a man. The brothers’ relationship is ridiculously fraught to the point where they each claim ownership of Elle in the most objectifying ways possible.

Noah also constantly gets in fights, takes girls to strange places to hook up with them, and lies to everyone, all of which makes me pretty confident in drawing a parallel between him and Edward Cullen, an equally problematic male love interest. This film isn’t even “it’s so bad it’s good.” It’s honestly a horrible thing for anyone, let alone teens, to watch, and if Netflix had a backbone they would take down this patriarchy loving piece of trash before it breaks their brand entirely.