Camp Rock 3 review: The Jonas Brothers' commitment to the cheese, campiness, and cringe borders on heroic

Oh boy. I watched Camp Rock 3, partly as an ode to my teenage years, back when my prefrontal cortex was still very much under construction and Disney Channel was allowed to raise me unsupervised.

Camp Rock, if you would do well to remember, was the film you watched when High School Musical wasn't on, the humble younger sibling of the DCOM universe, content to let Zac Efron have the spotlight while it convinced an entire generation that your moody, broody Prince Charming was definitely out there, as long as you could hold a harmony with him.

Mitchie Torres (Demi Lovato) spent two movies being embarrassed about her mom's cooking-based income and falling into the world's most lukewarm romance with Shane Gray (Joe Jonas), a pop star apparently contractually obligated to brood near a lake.

Now, nearly two decades later, we're back at camp, minus Mitchie, though Disney was kind enough to let Lovato swing by as an executive producer rather than actually showing up on screen, a decision the film handles by having the Jonas Brothers reprise their roles as Shane, Jason, and Nate Gray, in the fictional band Connect 3, alongside Maria Canals-Barrera as camp cook Connie Torres. So no Mitchie, but her mom's still slinging camp food, which feels like the DCOM equivalent of a Marvel post-credits scene.

The premise this time around is the closest thing to a plot Connect 3 has ever needed: The band loses their opening act ahead of a major reunion tour, so they trudge back to Camp Rock to find the next big thing.

Somewhere, a Disney executive is very proud of themselves for finding a plot device that both revives the IP and doesn't require anyone to explain why three grown men are still running a summer camp for teenagers.

Enter the new blood: bold and determined Sage and her easygoing brother Desi, cello prodigy Rosie, drummer-with-his-own-beat Cliff, choreo queen Callie, intimidating influencer Madison, and camp bad boy Fletch, a roster of descriptors so aggressively Disney Channel Original Movie that you could reconstruct the entire script from the cast list alone.

And yes, per your own eyewitness account, there's a sibling duo doing the heavy lifting on the 'found family, broken band, buried resentment' front, with one sibling sulking their way through camp like they were dragged there against their will and the other holding the emotional plot together. Groundbreaking, again, in the sense that Disney found this formula in 2008 and has simply refused to let it go.

Meanwhile, the actual Jonas Brothers, sorry, Connect 3, are doing what they do best: standing near a lake, harmonizing, and squabbling in a way that is theoretically about the band's future but is really just Kevin Jonas getting to make dad jokes on camera again. "Still no birdhouse," he mutters, which is either a deep-cut callback for the three people who remember the birdhouse subplot from 2008, or proof that the writers were contractually required to give Kevin one bit per film.

Is it cheesy? oh goodness, yes.

Is it cringe? Structurally, yes, this is a franchise that treats 'This is where I belong' as a full character arc rather than a single line of dialogue. But that's sort of the point. Camp Rock was never trying to be prestige television; it was trying to convince twelve-year-olds that summer camp came with a soundtrack and a shot at true love, and on that front, mission very much accomplished, then and now

Shane and Mitchie may be over, RIP to that ship, may it rest in the graveyard where all 2010 Disney ships eventually go, but the franchise has, somehow, found a way to keep the campfire burning without her.

Would I recommend it? To thirteen-year-old me, unreservedly. To current me, only with the same nostalgic squint I use to watch literally anything Disney Channel puts out, which, let's be honest, is exactly the audience this movie was built for.