Review of To All the Boys I've Loved Before (2018) by Theholyclyde — 31 Aug 2018

To All The Boys I've Loved Before looks really good. It is very well shot and color graded, and pretty much every scene in this is pleasant to the eye. I just wish its writing were as pretty as its looks. I found the exposition present in the dialogue to be a bit unsubtle and clumsy, but I don't think that's what hurt the movie the most.

The movie is painfully predictable. Once you get to know the characters and what the movie is actually about in the first 30 minutes, you can easily guess what's going to happen in the middle of it, and how it's going to end.

The acting is okay and somewhat entertaining. Nothing all that impressive. They didn't really go for a more realistic approach, which made the movie really feel like "a movie". The way the characters act and speak scream "teenage movie" rather than "actual teenagers", and the fact that the movie keeps falling into its genre's tropes doesn't help with that at all.

The movie tries to be funny sometimes, but the jokes don't actually land, although I did find the scenes with Anna Cathcart to be quite entertaining.

Its soundtrack will most likely appeal to any "cool" teenagers out there. Some songs are pretty enjoyable, but overall I found it a little bit boring. But nowhere near as boring as the movie's ending. The movie ends exactly how you would think it would end, and it does that in a very "meh" way.

To All The Boys I've Loved Before is a pretty Teenage Romance movie with okay-to-good acting and bland dialogue. Dialogue that fails to be funny most of the time it tries and that ends up sounding corny rather than cute. A predictable story with a "meh" ending. I'm pretty sure I'm not part of the audience this movie is targeting, but the way I see it, To All The Boys I've Loved Before tried, didn't exactly fail, but didn't succeed either.