Netflix has done…lots of things to the movie world and movie industry. One of the areas its lagging behind is creating movie stars, having only created 2 so far. Noah Centineo and Lana Condor are back being romcom heartthrobs in what should have been titled 2 All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. Real missed opportunity there.
All the games are over now. Lara Jean (Lana Condor) and Peter Kavinsky (Noah Centineo) have made it offich: they’re dating. Lara Jean and Peter are walking on cloud 9 for a hot minute, and then the fallout from their actions in the first movie come back. Peter’s ex Gen (Emilija Baranjac) might still have a thing for the boy next door, which scares the hell out of LJ. But even more scary to her, probably, is John Ambrose (Jordan Fisher), the last recipient of Lara Jean’s letters she wrote, who’s come back into her life, and he’s um, looking good…
The books 2 All the Boys (I’m sticking to this) are based on are from the point of view of Lara Jean. While the first movie does revolve around her, LJ got upstaged by those Peter Kavinsky hair curls. 2 All the Boys firmly plants us in Lara Jean’s head, beginning to end, giving Lana Condor more time to be the Molly Ringwald of the next generation. Condor is right at home in this John Hughes modernization, playing Lara Jean like your typical movie teen girl: nervous, neurotic, cute, and excited. Condor navigates all of these feelings pretty seamlessly, smoothly transitioning scene to scene. Her voiceover helps firmly plant you inside her head, reminding me and most of the audience that 80s girls were written by a middle aged white dude. To All the Boys is 100% a female centric movie, which puts a nice spin on the very 80s storytelling the screenplay knows is playing the romcom genre classics: a clumsy meet cute, teenage swooning leading to impossible promising, a breakup, you know the drill.
While the freshness is important, 2 All the Boys works because Centineo and Condor sizzle. Sometimes you just have to let streaming stars be streaming stars, am I right? Even though Centineo is sidelined a little more here, Peter Kavinsky has lost none of that boy next door charm that made all the teenage Netflix subscribers re up for another month. Jordan Fisher tries to capture that Kavinsky magic with Lana Condor, but it’s no contest. What impressed me the most was how natural the pair make it feel. They make every kiss, every fight, every awkward situation, grounded because of how well they know the characters they are playing. Yes, part of a romcom is “COMedy,” but the part that lasts longer is the other, key part: “ROMantic,” and 2 All the Boys will make people swoon and be nostalgic due to Netflix All Stars Noah Centineo and Lana Condor.
2 All the Boys is something Netflix’s algorithm can really be proud of. By identifying teenage girls as a key market, they simply conjured romcom success by modernizing and plagiarizing the John Hughes formula with 2 likable stars, which their algorithm also predicted by the movies the teen girls chose after watching the first To All the Boys. So…the algorithm decided to run it back! I’m picturing a journalist going into Netflix to interview their creative director, only to walk into an I, Robot scenario where the AI runs the company, trying to get a 3 into the To All the Boys I’ve loved before title, and trying to figure out if Noah Centineo looks young enough to pass for a high schooler in 2 years.