The Kissing Booth is 2018 romantic comedy about a high school student who is forced to confront her secret crush at a kissing booth.
Coloring in the lines of a high school movie doesn’t require too many crayons, the genre rarely much more than a few simple conflicts among a host of obvious stereotypes. From awkward love triangles to jocks versus nerds and more, these are a predictable lot with a specific audience that don’t often challenge beyond questions of when is the ugly duckling going to blossom and get the guy/girl of their dreams. With Vince Marcello‘s bubbly The Kissing Booth, we’re on the same train, with a light-hearted quasi-fantasy that doesn’t take any risks, playing out exactly what those watching are certainly expecting.
Elle (Joey King) and Lee (Joel Courtney) are high school pals who have literally been best friends since birth, the two sharing the same birthday with moms who are total BFFs. Elle and Lee are neighbors and pretty much do everything together, including masters of arcade dancing. To keep as close as they are, they’ve come up with a bunch of basic rules, including never sharing secrets, but lately, Number 9 is becoming a stickler, the one where they swear relatives are off-limits when it comes to romance. Problem is, Lee’s older brother Noah (Jacob Elordi) is a football hunk and she’s crushing bad. When she and Lee organize a kissing booth for the school carnival, thing fall into alignment, sort of, and then things go off the rails.
To be clear, The Kissing Booth is a mess, an over-the-top fairy tale that make a number wrong moves in telling its incredibly generic story. Elle is a girl who’s never been kissed and coming of age isn’t working out so well as she fumbles into sexual awareness. This is standard stuff, but the film wraps this around a character that makes a series of very questionable decisions that seem only in service of making her do so. From getting her in a skirt two-sizes too small to dancing on a pool table in her underwear to more, she is a pitfall of problems. All of these lead to what are meant to me passable hurdles designed to look like authentic high school conflicts. Thing is, they just don’t, with the movie constantly way out of reach. And once again, parents and adults are so far to the periphery, they hardly matter.
Noah is a cardboard character who looks like he’s protecting his brother’s best friend but is much more troubling, his constant smoldering and passive controlling of Elle hard to watch. It’s meant to be sort of charming, as he manipulates her with his schtick, though never, in the audience’s eyes, does he earn any trust. By far though, the worse message is that because he is ‘hot,’ he’s worth having, and the the only reason Elle (and every single female character in the movie) has any interest in him. It’s an empty and tiring motivation that in today’s climate seems hopelessly vapid. Even insulting. Yes, there are some consequences, but what’s the point?
The Kissing Booth certainly isn’t straying too far from the already narrow path, where teens live in a highly compressed world where every action spells acceptance or doom. Undoubtedly, the target audience may find some attraction to the hyperbolic story, easily able to project a bit of themselves into the easy-fit pieces. Hopefully, most will recognize its artificial take on it all, with some very worrisome behavior by boys that are all the more so in our current progressive attitudes. Even a cameo with Molly Ringwald, this comes up well short.
The Kissing Booth is currently streaming on Netflix.