The Kissing Booth 3 – Film Review

It’s the summer before Elle Evans (Joey King) heads to college, and she’s facing the hardest decision of her life: whether to move across the country with her dreamy boyfriend Noah (Jacob Elordi) or fulfill her lifelong promise to go to college with her best friend Lee (Joel Courtney). Whose heart will Elle break?

Vince Marcello‘s The Kissing Booth 3 provides a lot of comfort – not in the fact that it’s a genuinely heartwarming movie with tons of great emotional moments and bittersweet paths for our characters – but because you can watch it and sigh in relief while thinking “Thank God this is the last one”.

When the first installment in this awful trilogy was released in 2018, audiences all around groaned in unison, asking why they were planning to turn it into a trilogy. It didn’t help that each installment got worse and worse, and this third and final entry is the weakest of the three. This nearly two-hour movie felt like a three-hour movie because of how poorly written and directed it is.

There really is no storyline here, and the only “story” that this movie has is stretched way too far. At the end of the second film, our lead protagonist Elle Evans was faced with the choice of picking which college she wants to go to. She can either go to Harvard with her boyfriend Noah or go to Berkeley with her best friend since childhood, Lee.

You’d think that this third and final outing would focus on more than just that decision, but who are we kidding? Of course, it doesn’t. It’s a Kissing Booth movie after all, so you know that they’re just going to take that one little plotline and run with it for two hours and that’s exactly what they do here.

It would help if the central romance in the film was cute or wholesome, but it’s not. Ever since the first Kissing Booth movie was released, we have been given no genuine reason to care about the relationship between Elle and Noah. It’s made quite clear in each film in the series that Noah might not be the greatest guy in the world.

The second film teased Elle getting into a serious relationship with a new guy she meets named Marco (Taylor Zakhar Perez), and it would’ve made for a much more interesting and non-toxic romance. But of course, that’s not what happened. The writers found ways to seperate Elle and Marco and got her back together with Noah for some reason, even though he isn’t the best guy in the world.

The sheer toxicity of Elle and Noah’s relationship is genuinely impossible to overlook, and it’s what the entire franchise focuses on so it’s not like you can enjoy other aspects to these films. The closest thing we get to that in this series is Elle’s relationship with her best friend Lee which can be heartwarming at times, but the film rarely ever dives deep into that.

We know that they have been close ever since they were little kids and that they tell each other everything but we don’t really get a good understanding of who they are as friends. The script never lets us in on this storyline that would’ve made for a much better movie series than the one that we got.

It’s also just painful to watch the wonderfully talented Joey King continually get saddled with awful projects that don’t deserve her acting talents. She’s been the one constant in the Kissing Booth franchise. She brings so much energy and flair to this series and she definitely gives it her all, but I just wish that she got a better franchise to star in because there’s obviously a phenomenal actress inside of her, but this project is not a good way to let that flourish.

Other than watching King give it her all, The Kissing Booth 3 has nothing fun or entertaining to offer. If you’re a fan of this series then you’ll more than likely get a kick out of seeing Elle, Noah, Lee, and the rest of the gang say farewell, but if you’re not, you’ll be glad to be saying farewell to them.

Overall Grade: F

MPAA Rating: TV-14

Cast: Joey King, Joel Courtney, Jacob Elordi, Taylor Zakhar Perez, Maisie Richardson-Sellers, Meganne Young, Molly Ringwald, Stephen Jennings, Morné Visser, Carson White

Directed by: Vince Marcello

Written by: Vince Marcello, Jay Arnold

Distributed by: Netflix

Release Date: August 11, 2021

Running Time: 112 minutes