The Last Summer Review

May 6, 2019 at 6:10pm
By Jason Stettner

The Last Summer is a Netflix Original film that follows a pile of teenagers during their last months prior to college. It’s a rather typical type of romantic movie where you watch people have issues, break up and perhaps make up. Don’t expect anything too wildly unique and honestly for the most part a lot of this doesn’t make sense. It comes across as rather generic and falls in line with a number of tropes. You have multiple groups of basically completely different story lines going on.

This is nothing new, and sometimes works well in presenting a story. It just seems like random tales they shoved together for this movie. It also really didn’t seem to get, or well paint a realistic picture of today’s youth in any way. The situations seemed odd, or just out of touch for the most part. It dove into the realms of fantasy in some parts, and it wasn’t very interesting to watch. I certainly wasn’t too engaged with it.

I can’t say I was blown away by how this was shot, but it did have a nice use of light in most situations. Really aiming to reach into that overly fancy element that you would see in commercials of today that are aimed at younger, perhaps hip people. The dialogue was honestly just weak and some lines were cringe worthy.

I stopped at one point to mention to who I was watching this with that the dialogue was just dreadful, this wasn’t very far in either. Some of the plots were a bit odd, I wasn’t a fan of the young folks working towards the older ladies through lying because they were “not cool”. The main story came across as being Griffin (K.J. Apa) and Phoebe (Maia Mitchell) as it certainly had the most development in terms of narrative. Even with that, there was almost too much going since they fit in so many layered plots throughout the movie.

The Conclusion

The Last Summer fails to deliver interesting stories with a misguided look at youth, and weak dialogue. It was just very typically in every sense in regards to the structures of what each kid was doing. You could tell and be right what would happen for every single perspective from the moment they popped up on the screen. It would have been nicer to get something with real substance. If you’re just looking for some perhaps happy tales of romance, I guess this delivers on that.

The Last Summer Review at Home with Streamed Viewing

Rating Overall: 3.0