To All the Boys 2 PS I Still Love You is currently streaming on Netflix.

To All the Boys 2 PS I Still Love You movie cast: Noah Centineo, Lana Condor, Jordan Fisher
To All the Boys 2 PS I Still Love You movie director: Michael Fimognari
To All the Boys 2 PS I Still Love You movie rating: 2 stars

Netflix’s To All the Boys 2: PS I Still Love You has a few memorable and sweet moments. That’s it. 15-20 minutes into the movie, I felt this is not really sequel material. To All the Boys 2 takes off from where To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018) left things. And as was the case with the origin story, here too we witness a needless love triangle and three good-looking people fighting over each other. A tale as old as time. The makers had got things right the first time, but why do you need to repeat yourself if you had already hit it out of the park with the same material before?

To All the Boys 2 goes on for nearly two hours. But thankfully, not all of it is a snooze-fest. A few introductory parts speak of innocent love and what is unlikable about watching that. However, if you extend that sequence and make a whole movie out of it, that is when things start getting problematic. To All the Boys 2 overdoes the mushy stuff. Maybe it is the audience who has grown up, or the definition of love has undergone a drastic transformation, which makes this Netflix film hard to digest after a point.

What this romantic drama does get right are the performances. Lead stars Lana Condor, Noah Centineo and Jordan Fisher know their characters inside out, and they don’t feel too old for the part, as it happens often with high school romances. Lana especially shines as the somewhat reticent but sassy-when-poked Lara Jean. The movie deals with the idea that it is possible to fall for multiple people simultaneously. While this idea of loving two people at once is mature, the plot and characters are not. This is one of the reasons why To All the Boys 2 feels empty and directionless.

The ‘letters’ are old and the faces familiar. The love is new, but the tension stale. What the writers and filmmakers need to understand is mainly this — if you cannot make the familiar unfamiliar, at least make it entertaining.