To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You Review: Forget All the Boys, This Sequel is the Real Heartbreaker

This review contains spoilers for the Netflix Original Movie To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You.

2018 was the year To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before brought the nostalgia of the eighties rom-com back to life, winning over Netflix subscribers everywhere with an age-old trope and diverse modern-day love story.

Now Lara Jean (Lana Condor) and Peter (Noah Centineo) have returned to their rightful place on our screens, just in time for their sequel To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You. And they’re not alone as newcomer and love letter recipient John Ambrose (Jordan Fisher) looks to cut the highschool honeymooning short.

The continuation of this quirky romance serenades us with the promise of many adorable first. But as much as we love Lara Jean and Peter’s ability to overcome anything, we can’t ignore the hurdles this film chooses to disregard in order to get its happy ending.

You expect the boys to break your heart, but you don’t expect the film to.

The first half of this sequel is brimming with adorable little moments that instantly pull us back into the warm fever dream of teenage love that is Lara Jean’s life.

Trevor (Ross Butler) is a standout addition to the cast, winning us over with his dorky one-liners and overzealous reactions to pizza.

Trevor and Chris falling in love over subway sandwiches and the smell of sawdust is such a fun twist. Their relationship gives necessary comedic relief to this drama heavy rom-com and is honestly just so adorable.

Trevor: Why are you coming from the river?
Chris: I just buried a dead body.

The scene transitions we have come to love from the first film are back in full force as we are beautifully transported from location to location by gorgeous cinematography, colorful banners, and nostalgic car rides.

Food and baking play such an important part in Lara Jean’s life, so the additional shots of meals disappearing from their bowls and strudels baking in the oven are all but consumed blissfully by the audience.

Finding an actress capable of portraying the elusive Stormy seems nearly impossible and yet Holland Taylor makes the feat look effortless. She gives this strong-willed heartbreaker just the right amount of swagger and honesty to make her likable. And she may seem crude but I’m glad the film doesn’t shy away from the more scandalous parts of her past.

Kitty, Dr. Covey, and Ms. Rothschild round out this stellar cast of characters by playing to their strengths and betting on love, regardless of the odds.

The fame of the first film skyrocketed Lara Jean and Peter to YA couple hall of fame status. Now they’re back to reclaim our hearts, this time with real dates and real stakes. From squeamish octopus dissections and to fork debates at the dinner table, this quirky couple is thriving and we couldn’t be happier.

Even as Lara Jean and Peter begin to struggle with the loves from their past, they’re late-night carnival shenanigans and grand Valentine’s Day gifts have us wishing for a relationship like their’s all over again.

For the first half of the film, it feels like Covey and Kavinsky have this dating thing on lock. But doubt creeps in and the conflict between Lara Jean and Peter begins to rush. As if the film spends too much time getting the best shots that they forget to sprinkle in a bit of conflict here and there, so it has to be thrown in all at once.

The reasons for why Peter and LJ break up are valid — not to mention incredibly scandalous. But their explosive confrontation outside the school just makes these reasons feel less than. And it doesn’t help that the contents of this fight are never dealt with properly.

Centineo and Condor are on their game. If only they had a better-structured film to support them. Lara Jean and Peter don’t exactly earn that final “I Love You,” but these actors earned every second of screen time they are given.

To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You gives us the Peter Kavinsky we can still love and root for.

There’s a turning point in the film where Lara Jean asks Peter if he wants his necklace back and it physically pains Peter to take it off her neck. The whole thing is incredibly emotional.

It’s at this moment that the film decides to take an important diversion from Book Peter to create a better movie version of our heartthrob.

At the end of the day, this is a smart decision and it’s a decision born from the more unfortunate circumstances of this film. The sequel has very little time to make Peter look like the bad guy and redeem him properly. Hell, we don’t even get half the John Ambrose escapades we should due to time restraints, let alone enough screen time with Peter.

If Film Peter did half of what he did in the books we wouldn’t still be Team Peter right now.

It’s no secret this sequel hindered on whether or not John Ambrose could make us fall in love with him.

Lara Jean may not pick John but we’d pick Jordan Fisher any day to be our prince charming. His natural charm breaths life into a beloved character from the books and solidifies John Ambrose as the boy of every girl’s dreams.

I mean what does this boy not do? He writes incredibly romantic letters, expresses his feelings in healthy ways, and plays spontaneous ballads on the piano. He truly is the sophisticated YA boyfriend we deserve.

Lara Jean: Are you kidding? Everyone liked you in middle school.
John Ambrose: I don’t really think that’s true. But even if it was, I didn’t care about everyone.

So, it’s disappointing to see To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You treat him so dirty. The moment Lara Jean steps away and declares her love for Peter, John Ambrose just disappears into the night, never to be seen again.

He joins Josh in rom-com purgatory, where all boys go once the plot no longer has a use for them as a love interest for Lara Jean. And to make matters worse, all the screen time devoted to building John’s character instead of Peter’s instantly becomes useless.

It’s too bad we didn’t have a moment with John after the fact, so he could tease that great line from the book about timing and how maybe one day they can find each other again. That one line would have made their story feel final, not cynical.

There’s a lot to love about John Ambrose, but the film’s treatment of him leaves little to be desired.

And here is where To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You’s greatest problems lies.

As the film enters the crucial final moments it begins to reveal an ugly inability to portray the boys in LJ’s love story as human beings. Outside of being her love interest, there’s nothing to tie John to this story on his own, which is a darn shame because he is a very complex man.

Even Peter feels two-dimensional at times in this sequel as his feelings become an extension of Lara Jean’s.

The one character that does get the proper film treatment is Gen. Her forgiveness for LJ is no doubt a surprise considering their relationship in the source material. This adaptation of their friendship might be drastically different but it does feel organic for the story the film is telling.

The plot does not force these two girls into professing their love to each other by the end of the film and that’s okay. Real heartbreak takes time and talking to heal — something Peter and Lara Jean desperately needed more of before their final scene.

To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before became a hit because it adapted the parts of the source material we could fall in love with while looking for new ways to tell this story on a cinematic scale. The result was an adaptation that took huge departures from the books but never once lost the essence of the story — thus making it a universal hit.

Torn between honouring the source material in new ways and telling its own story, To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You stumbles under the pressure and loses sight of what matters in the process.

That being said, I still find myself falling in love with this blindingly bright fantasy where boys express themselves openly and every school crush can come to fruition. It feels good to live in that world, even if it is only for a minute.

Let’s not forget that YA sequels like Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters and Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials exist and have done far more damage to their stories than a few plot holes ever could to the To All the Boys franchise.

So you know what, break our hearts, Lara Jean. Break them into a thousand pieces. We’ll still come back for more.

All the Other Thoughts:

• Lara Jean and John Ambrose have too good of handwriting to be together. Us chicken scratchers need someone to write our grocery lists for us.
• Sure, in the real world, a person could go outside and make snow angels with their bare arms, but we call that natural selection not romantic.
• Not one “whoa, whoa, whoa” from Peter the entire movie. We have been robbed.
• “She cut down her hedges. That is a metaphor.” PROTECT KITTY AT ALL COSTS.
• Jenny Hann continues to kill the cameo game, caressing that poor sobbing girl’s hair like it’s her job.
• Where is Josh? Last time I checked he has to come out of his house for school.
• Kitty, a 6th grader, has successfully set up more people than The Bachelor franchise ever has.
• Lara Jean suiting up to “Kill This Love” is out to dethrone Twilight’s baseball scene for greatest cinematic scene of our time, and you know what? It just might.

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To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You is streaming now on Netflix.

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