The Last Summer is a romantic comedy for lovers of teen drama
The Last Summer is a movie about a group of kids experiencing young love and the uncertainty that comes after high school graduation.
The Last Summer takes you back (or forward) to the time right after high school when life is full of uncertainties. At that point in your life, school is all you know and it’s a weird world between being a kid and an adult. With that come tough decisions like where to go to college, summer jobs, relationship juggling, and finding out who you are outside of the high school social circles. The Last Summer attempts to address all of these things for a group of kids living in Chicago.
The cast is loaded with young talent: K.J. Apa (Riverdale), Maia Mitchell (The Fosters), Jacob Latimore (The Chi), Sosie Bacon (13 Reasons Why), Halston Sage (The Orville) and many more have major roles in the film. The movie starts with the graduation and then shifts out to following several separate stories involving the kids from this school.
The movie gets off to a tricky start because they introduce all of these characters very quickly and I initially got a few of them mixed up while trying to keep track of who was who. Some of the stories are strong, while others probably didn’t need to make the movie.
What I didn’t like
It feels like the director/writers weren’t sure what type of movie they wanted to make when they started. That or they wanted to cover as many types of kids as possible and let it compromise their strong storylines. Two, in particular, stood out for me as unnecessary.
The first one was the nerds. Mario Revolori (Sierra Burgess is a Loser) and Jacob McCarthy (A.P. Bio) play Reece and Chad. They’re the two nerds and they spend their summer wearing suits and hanging out at a bar that day traders frequent. They drink, they give weird stock advice, and they hook up with grown women. Contrasted against the more serious stories this one felt like an unnecessary addition.
The other follows Wolfgang Novogratz (Sierra Burgess is a Loser), the hunky jock who creates a “hit list” of girls from the school that he plans to try to sleep with. Of course, it catches up to him and his story really doesn’t add anything to the movie.
What I did like
Those stories aside, there were three very strong stories that were the only reason I managed to stay invested. First, we had the romance between Griffin (K.J. Apa) and Phoebe (Maia Mitchell). They are both artistic (Phoebe, film and Griffin, music) who have chosen to attend big schools in New York. They hit it off pretty quickly and the romance grows throughout the course of the film until outside forces create some major conflicts for them. This story could have been its own movie and would have likely been a hit romantic comedy.
Secondarily, there was the couple that decided that they couldn’t make it since they were going to different schools. Alec (Jacob Lattimore) and Erin (Halston Sage) decide to break up and try to remain friends at the beginning of the summer. They’ve been dating for the last two years of high school and people are shocked that this is where they’ve gone but they’re trying to make grown-up decisions. Alec ends up being approached by, and becoming an item with, “the hot girl” almost immediately after this breakup and Erin ends up dating a celebrity. This story could also have been its own romantic comedy.
The last story was not romantic at all and was the most meaningful in the movie. Erin’s friend Audrey (Sosie Bacon) has not gotten into her schools of choice and isn’t sure what she wants to do. She ends up getting a job as a personal assistant and hits it off with the client (a young girl whose mom wants her to be an actress.) Her experience leads to her reevaluate what’s important to her over the course of the film and making a huge decision by the end.
Both romantic stories go very dramatically and the third is very touching. Had the movie just been these three stories, it would not have as many bad reviews as it does.
Overall
If you can get through the first 15-20 minutes of chaos in trying to keep up with who is who The Last Summer becomes what you have to expect it to be. It’s teenage romance and drama with some goofy storylines mixed in with the serious ones. If you like teenage drama series or movies then you can definitely add this one to your list. It is rated TV-14 for language and sexual situations.
The Last Summer is currently streaming on Netflix.