The second F*ck Love film trades a Curaçao recovery trip for an Ibiza bachelorette, keeps most of the original friends, gives Lisa’s love interest Jim a new face and bets that the island getaway has one more round in it.

F*ck Love Too starts where plenty of romantic comedies finish: with a relationship already over. Lisa, played again by Bo Maerten, comes back to the Netherlands after a breakup and walks straight into someone else’s happy ending, because her friend Kiki is getting married. The friends pack for Ibiza and a bachelorette trip, and the film uses that trip to shuffle flings, old flames and new arrivals across a large ensemble.

A sequel that keeps its island blueprint

The Dutch-language film, released at home as F*ck de liefde 2, is the follow-up to F*ck Love, the 2019 comedy in which Lisa was going through a rocky divorce and her friends flew her to Curaçao to take her mind off it. The sequel keeps the core of that design: a heartbroken woman, a loyal group of friends and a sunny island a long way from Dutch weather. What changes is the occasion. The first film was a rescue mission. The second is a party organised around somebody else’s wedding, which puts Lisa’s own uncertainty next to a friend who has, at least on paper, already made up her mind.

Appie Boudellah directs again, this time with Aram van de Rest, who also takes a small role on screen as Ferry. On the first film, Boudellah had shared the director’s chair with Lodewijk van Lelyveld. The screenplay is credited to Shariff Nasr, Sergej Groenhart, Appie Boudellah and Mustapha Boudellah, and the producers are Adel Boudellah, Appie Boudellah, Mustapha Boudellah and Evert van de Grift. Three Boudellah names across the writing and producing credits make this a tightly held operation at AM Pictures, the company that also stood behind the 2019 original.

The larger change happened off screen. The first film reached Dutch cinemas through Just Film Distribution; the sequel went straight to Netflix, which released it worldwide on a single day. For a comedy of this kind, that is a different life. A Dutch ensemble romance that once would have played mainly to a domestic audience landed in the same menu as Hollywood rom-coms, subtitled for viewers who had never seen, or heard of, the first instalment.

Who comes back, and who is new

Most of the original friends return. Yolanthe Cabau is back as Bo, Victoria Koblenko as Cindy, Nienke Plas as Kiki, Maurits Delchot as Said and Edwin Jonker as Jack. Bettina Holwerda plays Angela, and the cast list keeps growing with Anouk Maas as Monica, Dorian Bindels as Noah and May Sampers as Javier. Cabau and Koblenko are among the better-known names in the line-up, and their return is part of the commercial logic of a film designed to be watched with friends rather than alone.

The most conspicuous change concerns Jim. Both films have a Jim in Lisa’s orbit, but the first cast Thijs Römer and the second casts Géza Weisz. Recasting the man a romantic lead is drawn to is a delicate move in any franchise, because an audience’s attachment to a screen couple is partly an attachment to two specific faces. A sequel that swaps one of them is asking returning viewers to transfer their goodwill to a new actor on the strength of a name and a place in the story, while newcomers simply meet the character fresh.

The bachelorette trip as a plot engine

The destination bachelorette is one of the most dependable set-ups in modern comedy. It takes the characters away from the rules of home and hangs a deadline over everything they do: the wedding is coming whether anyone is ready or not. Kiki’s marriage gives F*ck Love Too that clock, and Ibiza, with its long reputation as the Mediterranean’s party island, supplies the permission. The move from a Caribbean island to a Balearic one also keeps the postcard appeal of the original while bringing the trip within a short flight of Amsterdam.

Ensemble romance has a solid commercial tradition in the Netherlands. Alles is liefde, Joram Lürsen’s 2007 film that braided several couples’ stories together in the days around the arrival of Sinterklaas, became a domestic hit on the multi-strand model Richard Curtis had popularised with Love Actually. The F*ck Love films sit in that lineage structurally, with many couples and one shared deadline, while trading the festive season for a holiday register and a title that announces its attitude before a single scene plays.

That structure is also the film’s hardest problem. The cast list runs well past a dozen named characters, and the running time is 92 minutes, slightly shorter than the 96 minutes of the first film. Lisa’s love life, Kiki’s wedding and the friends’ own romantic complications all compete for the same screen time, and a design like that tends to reward broad strokes over development. The more threads an ensemble comedy carries, the less room each one has to surprise.

The craft on paper

Behind the camera, the sequel changed hands as well. Bart Beekman is credited as cinematographer, taking over from Max Maloney, who shot the first film, and the score is credited to Denzel Chain and Anthony Micheal. It is a Dutch production through and through, shot in Dutch, with the Spanish island serving as the backdrop for a story about Dutch friends abroad.

For Appie Boudellah, the film consolidates a small franchise built around the same circle of women, and this time he shares it with a co-director who also appears in front of the camera. For Bo Maerten, it means carrying Lisa for a second time, now as a character audiences already know has come through one collapse and is heading, almost by design, towards another round of the same questions.

Where it lands

F*ck Love Too premiered on Netflix worldwide on 20 May 2022. Its title says plainly what it is: a second helping of a brand whose name doubles as its mood. The film does not pretend to reinvent the template it inherited from the first instalment, and the open question for any viewer is whether the same friends, a new island and a wedding countdown are reason enough to go back.

For anyone who enjoyed the first film, the sequel promises more time with the same company in a sunnier location. For anyone arriving cold, it works as a compact case study in how a local comedy brand travels once a streamer takes it global: the language stays Dutch and the setting moves south, but the formula makes the trip unchanged.