Lara Jean is a teenage girl living with her widoved father and two sisters, Kitty and Margot. When her older sister Margot goes to study in Scotland, she breaks up with her boyfriend Josh. Lara Jean has a crush on Josh, but realizes it would be inapropriate to date her sister's ex. Lara Jean wrote five love letters to the guys she has a crush on, yet never sent them. One day, her letters are gone and were mailed by Kitty to Peter, Josh and Lucas, who is gay. In order to deflect from talking with Josh about the letter, Lara Jean kisses Peter, and they also decide to fake a relationship to make Peter's ex Gen jealous. When Peter really gets feelings for Lara Jean, it causes a lot of troubles, but in the end they truly become a couple.
Based on Jenny Han's popular teen romantic comedy novel, "To All the Boys I've Loved Before" is considered the best entry in this film trilogy, a sweet, honest, humble, loveable and funny little film with a great lead, Lana Condor, who plays Lara Jean with charm. The concept of someone sending the heroine's unsent love letters is tantalizing, though it is too quickly concluded when Lara Jean decides to lead a "pretend relationship" with Peter, which becomes the real, unannounced new plot of the story from around 40 minutes in. The movie starts refreshingly daft: Lara Jean imagines she is in a romance novel, seeing Josh on the meadow, all until she is hit in the face with a pillow, as the camera pans to the left to reveal her sister in the house who threw it, and then the camera pans right, revealing the "normal" Lara Jean in bed, in a cool match cut. Sadly, the rest of the story is less inspired, running sometimes better and sometimes weaker, depending on how snappy the dialogue is. Some lines are great ("How does he look at me?" - "Like you're a sexy little Rubik's cube. He can't figure you out, but he's having fun trying." / "Look, her logic was off, but her heart was in the right place!" - "Her face is gonna be in the wrong place!"), yet there are also long empty spots in between. Both the actors playing Lara Jean's crushes act self-congratulatory and do not feel genuine, whereas the story needed more sharpness, yet it is overall an endearing and sympathetic depiction of the chaos time of high school life.
Grade:++
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