When thinking about “The Kissing Booth 2,” I’m reminded of 2018 when Netflix released a bunch of low-quality teen romcoms, many of which starred Noah Centineo. For better or worse, Netflix decided to revamp their romcom releases, starting with “To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You,” which was released earlier this year. These romcoms, especially “The Kissing Booth Series,” are filled with cliched tropes, terrible acting, and, to put it politely, not so great writing.

The second edition of “The Kissing Booth” starts right after Noah (Jacob Elordi), goes off to Harvard after spending the summer with Elle (Joey King) while she is starting her senior year. While at Harvard, Noah connects with Chole Winthrop, an iconic long-legged international woman who anyone would dump Elle for. (Sorry Elle but Chole speaks Italian and that’s literally the most attractive thing anyone can do.) While Noah is away at Harvard, Elle starts to connect with the “hot” new guy Marco Pena, played by Taylor Zakhar Perez. 

Both Elordi and King return to mediocre performances strung together with an equally mediocre storyline. This comes after both acted quite impressively in their 2019 work. Elordi starred in “Euphoria” while King played the lead role in “The Act.” Elle and Marco play out the stereotypical hate-turned-to-love dynamic. To be honest, this trope really only works well in certain cases, and it wasn’t pulled off in this movie. In the beginning, they hated each other for practically no reason, and never had enough of an emotional connection to warrant a romance.  Also, for a movie that was two hours long, a lot of unnecessary things were added. Lee Flynn (Joel Courtney), Elle’s “best friend” (don’t get me started on this one), added essentially nothing to the plot and just acted like a terrible person overall to both his “best friend” and girlfriend. A physical kissing booth, which is pretty weird as a school fundraiser itself, was shoved in not so subtly right before the closing credits. It added nothing to the plot, except to cement the token gay couple.

Unfortunately, “The Kissing Booth 3” has already been filmed and will probably be put onto Netflix sometime in the near future. While granted, these “teen” movies are super awkward, they can be fun to watch and even more enjoyable to make fun of. Even Netflix understands this and has added “The Kissing Booth 2” to their cringe binge section. Despite the reasons you watch it, this will probably not be a movie that will have a significance in five years, unless it becomes some sort of meme. It falls short on every measure used to grade movie watchability but still can provide entertainment at least as something to put on in the background while scrolling through social media.