‘Anyone But You’ Review: Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell Can’t Fake the Fizz in Strained Rom-Com

David Rooney
·5 min read
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Anyone who’s seen Glen Powell in Richard Linklater’s terrifically enjoyable Hit Man will know he’s a bona fide movie star with charisma to burn. If you were paying attention, that was evident even in Top Gun: Maverick. And Sydney Sweeney has shown impressive range, serving delicious mean-girl snark in season one of The White Lotus, tracing a self-destructive spiral on Euphoria and demonstrating serious dramatic chops in Reality. But neither screen chemistry nor laughs can be manufactured, especially not with the kind of pedestrian writing in Will Gluck’s Anyone But You, which does nothing to reanimate the moribund studio rom-com.

Before he got busy with two Peter Rabbit movies that apparently do exist, or the unfortunate 2014 Annie remake, Gluck turned heads with the 2010 teen comedy Easy A, a contemporary take on The Scarlet Letter elevated by a star-making turn from Emma Stone. The director riffs on another classical source here by reworking Much Ado About Nothing at a destination wedding in Sydney, Australia. The new film also marks Gluck’s second stab at a rom-com, after 2011’s Friends With Benefits.

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In Ilana Wolpert and Gluck’s screenplay, Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedick become Bostonians Bea (Sweeney), a dissatisfied law student, and Ben (Powell), who works in finance or something. They meet cute in a coffee bar, spend an idyllic day walking and talking, hang out for an entire night in which everything seems to click magically into place and then sever all contact the next morning due to some crossed wires.

It’s no dig at the script to say the tried-and-true formula dictates that they’ll spend the entire movie trying to get past that miscommunication and resulting mutual hostility for long enough to realize they’re in love.

When they meet by chance a year after the tarnished first date, it’s at the engagement party of Halle (Hadley Robinson) and Claudia (Alexandra Shipp), the harmonious Hero and Claudio of this version. Halle is Bea’s sister, while Claudia is the sibling of Ben’s best bud, Pete (GaTa). Halle and Bea’s father Leo (Dermot Mulroney) announces he and his wife Innie (Rachel Griffiths) are flying everyone to Australia for the nuptials. The entire wedding party will be guests at the swanky Sydney beach house of Claudia’s parents, Australian Roger (Bryan Brown) and American Carol (Michelle Hurd).

Friction between Bea and Ben starts on the plane and continues when they hit the ground and find they’ll be sharing quarters. In one of those plot contrivances that you can swallow in Shakespeare but causes eye-rolls anyplace else, the nemeses decide to pretend they’re in love in order not to wreck the wedding weekend. At the same time, other members of the party conspire — unconvincingly — to trick Bea and Ben into believing they love each other.

Also attending the wedding are Claudia’s cousin Margaret (Charlee Fraser) with her affable dumb-hunk surfer boyfriend Beau (Joe Davidson), while meddlesome Leo and Innie spring the unwelcome surprise on Bea of inviting her ex, Jonathan (Darren Barnet): “But honey, he’s part of the family.” Since Margaret broke Ben’s heart after a fling a few years back, Bea and Ben’s fake-romance ruse serves the dual aim of making Margaret jealous enough to want him back. It also stands to thwart Bea’s parents’ plan, since she has no desire to rekindle things with sweet but “too comfortable” Jonathan.

The complications! If only they were fun. Given that the initial rancor between Bea and Ben feels fabricated, their ongoing animosity never acquires any teeth. This is an R-rated comedy that tries hard to be edgy, showing a decent amount of toned skin and liberally sprinkling “fuck” through the dialogue. Plus lesbians! But there’s never enough tension to disguise its blandness. Despite all their protestations to the contrary, Bea and Ben are too clearly into each other to spark real conflict.

Listen, I’m an Australian expat, and if you slap a koala and some gum trees on the screen, you’re pretty much guaranteed to hit my nostalgic sweet spot. Even more so if you throw a party on the spectacular Bondi-to-Tamarama Beach clifftops. Anyone But You has all those things and more, and yet it has so little sense of place it could be anywhere. Gluck’s Sydney has a movie-ish gloss not unlike Richard Curtis’ London. It’s a place where the Opera House steps are littered with couples proposing and the helicopter rescue service is forever at the ready to fish stupid rich people out of dangerous waters.

It doesn’t require the presence of Mulroney and Griffiths — shamefully wasted and stripped of the acerbic bite that can make her such an asset — to tip us off that Gluck is a fan of My Best Friend’s Wedding. That becomes even more obvious in a full-ensemble singalong, this time not to Dionne Warwick but to Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten.” The 2004 hit is Ben’s “serenity song,” given that despite his super-fit physique, he’s a scaredy cat, afraid of flying and heights and a lousy swimmer.

That’s about as close as either of the leads get to having a character to play. Mostly, they just have the unenviable task of fleshing out the familiar tropes of a fake-it-till-you-make-it romance in a movie not graced with much charm or wit. The secondary roles are no more interesting. At least the end credits make it look like they had a great time making it. But I’m a sucker for a frothy rom-com with sexy leads, and this did nothing for me.

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