Tall Girl 2: Just When I Thought It Couldn’t Get Worse It Did

I’m sure you all saw the title of this post and had one question: why?

Why would I watch Tall Girl 2 when Tall Girl 1 was so bad? Why would I waste even more of my life writing about it? Why would I subject all of you, dear readers, to reading about such an atrocity?

The answer is because I simply cannot help myself. I am obsessed with the horribleness, and now that I have suffered, I will not do it alone.

Tall Girl 2 was, if possible, worse than the original. The best way to describe it is if you take the Kissing Booth 2 and cross it with High School musical and Aesop’s Fables. In other words, a mess with a theme. In the sequel, Jodi attempts to overcome her height, her terribly clingy boyfriend, and her anxiety by auditioning for the school play. They break up on and off and bunch of times throughout the show, for reasons that don’t make sense to me at all.

It was as if Netflix couldn’t figure out how to tell a story with them together, and so it broke them up for some spice. Or maybe they realized the boy that Jodi is dating is actually really annoying so they wanted to write him out of the show as much as possible.

We already knew going into the show that they were going to try to make Jodi’s height seem like something she is regularly discriminated against for. As a tall person, I have never once been discriminated against for my height, with the notable exception of the time I went to a concert and this girl kept poking me in the back repeatedly because I was “too tall to be there”. Still, on the grand scheme of things, there is no discrimination in the way that Tall Girl 2 seems to think there is.

What I didn’t see coming was the fact that we were also going to give Jodi anxiety. And to demonstrate this anxiety, we were going to have the “turn the world blurry spin around in circles” montage that I could not hate more. Overall 0/10. What I REALLY didn’t see coming is that by the end of the movie, we would have CURED Jodi’s anxiety / imposter syndrome simply by GETTING BACK TOGETHER WITH HER BOYFRIEND. and having the mean girl be nice for one second.

wut.

is.

happening.

Honestly if someone had told me earlier that a boyfriend would cure my anxiety maybe I would have tried harder to not be gay.

Netflix saving the tall anxious bisexual girls of the world!!!

There was one thing about this movie that I did like, and that’s the blooming romance between Stig (the tall european boy that was in the love triangle w Jodi and her current boy in the original) and Fareeda (Jodi’s best friend). I will say that I wish they gave Fareeda her own love interest, instead of recycling Jodi’s, and I also think that Stig massively overstepped boundaries at times that made me personally uncomfortable to watch and then the show passed off as cute and romantic, but it was nice to see Fareeda happy and getting a main storyline. Because her life is just so much more interesting than Jodi’s! Fareeda is making her own clothes and getting them put on display at a local boutique!! I want more of that story and less of YET ANOTHER school play.

This movie decided to have roughly four different plots, making it overall way too long, and I am going to ignore the boyfriend/stig’s sister plotline because it was overall confusing and did not add anything to my viewing experience except an extra 30 minutes. The plotline that deserves some time here in this review is the mean girl redemption arc.

Kimmy was known for bullying Jodi and being generally mean, and also for being the lead in the school play. Think Sharpay Evans, but her sidekick is not her brother. When Kimmy gets beat out for the lead in the school play by Gabriella Jodi, she wants her sidekick to scare Jodi out of the play. The sidekick is in love with Jodi, just like everyone in this show is, because the discrimination IS NOT REAL, so he refuses to do it. This sends Kimmy down a road of self discovery, and she ends up becoming nice by the end of the movie. It was all very weird and forced and unrealistic.

It felt like they only did it to have a good reason for Jodi to overcome her panic attack, but realistically a lot of people just… do. And a lot of people don’t! But to have the reason she overcame her anxiety and performed be so based on external factors was, I felt, a disservice to anything they were trying to do by normalizing her anxiety and its symptoms. So many anxious people do not have a bully that miraculously turns nice in their time of need, or a boyfriend that gets back together with them at just the right time, but they still manage to be successful all on their own.

So yes, I hated this movie. And yes, I felt the need to write an entire review proclaiming it.

Don’t watch it.

Or do, and rant with me in the comments.