America has been starved for pure, unapologetic, multiplex-grade romantic comedies, and Will Gluck’s “Anyone but You” doesn’t waste any time announcing itself as one of those. The first five minutes alone serve up a classic meet-cute in a coffee shop, a funny but wholly illogical bit of physical comedy involving a splash of water that might be mistaken for a pee stain, and a magical — but chaste — night together in a personality-less bachelor pad that looks just like an Ikea showroom.
If not for the hint of self-awareness that allows Bea (Sydney Sweeney) to put Ben (Glen Powell) on blast for his dude-bro decor, nothing about this prologue would seem the least bit out of place at the start of a mid-tier Julia Roberts movie from 1997. Not the leading man whose chiseled smile makes your own features seem like the parody of a face by comparison, nor the perma-flustered producer/ingénue whose character is just your average strong but socially inept generational sex symbol next door; not the boy’s wise but kooky BFF Pete (the actor and rapper GaTa, whose stoned riff on Rhys Ifans becomes the movie’s most reliable source of laughs), not the girl’s inexplicable decision to sneak out the next morning even though she’s already head-over-heels for him, and definitely not the strained twist of fate that finds Bea coming back to Ben’s place just in time to overhear the insecure fuckboy make fun of the beautiful stranger who appears to have ghosted him the first chance she got.
It’s a good thing these two unspeakably hot people who hate each other with the lustful fire of a thousand suns will never cross paths again!
In a different context, that might be an unbearably contrived start to a movie. In the smooth-brained tradition of a genre defined by the senselessness of love, however, it’s a perfect setup for the most patently sincere rom-com that’s made it to the big screen in a very long time. It’s the opening salvo of a movie that wants you to know it was made in 2023, and that it knows it was made in 2023, but only so that it can yank off the ironic veil of detachment that often keeps modern audiences at too great of a distance to enjoy a timeless story.
There’s a reason “Anyone but You” hasn’t been advertised as a spiritual successor to “My Best Friend’s Wedding” (complete with the Dermot Mulroney/Rachel Griffiths reunion you never knew you always wanted), let alone as a loose retelling of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” (complete with lines from the play literally written into the sets, a rare overstep in a throwback whose cringiness tends to be more of a feature than a bug). Indeed, the film’s tonally confused ad campaign feels related to the recent trend of studios disguising their musicals as straight comedies; if “Euphoria” fans knew this was the kind of movie that ends with a full cast sing-along of Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten” over the end credits, they might not put themselves in a position to enjoy it.
Right, the plot. It doesn’t really matter, and Gluck — a relatively seasoned rom-com vet (“Easy A,” “Friends with Benefits”) who was stranded at sea by the genre’s sudden disappearance and forced to direct “Peter Rabbit” movies until Sweeney came along in her rescue boat — doesn’t sweat the small stuff. It turns out that Bea’s sister Halle (Hadley Robinson) is getting married to Pete’s sister Claudia (Alexandra Shipp) at a destination wedding in Australia, where the latter’s rich stepdad (the great Bryan Brown) lives with their mom (Michelle Hurd). The forever untethered Ben and the newly single Bea are both in the brides’ inner circle, and forced to spend the weekend before the wedding under the same, luxurious roof in an open-air mansion along the Gold Coast. It’s basically the situation that casual sex was invented for, or it would be if they didn’t love to hate each other so much.
That premise is complicated enough to sustain 103 minutes of content, but it’s far too simple for Shakespeare. Enter: Bea’s ex-boyfriend and childhood sweetheart Jonathan (“Never Have I Ever” and “Blue Eye Samurai” star Darren Barnet), who her overbearing parents (Griffiths and Mulroney!) have invited in the hopes that they’ll get back together. Bea isn’t tempted — she’s ready to be her own woman and stop living by everyone else’s metrics for success.
The same can’t be said for Ben, a human 12-pack with perfectly stylized hair, whose only redeeming feature is the shame that he feels bad for working at Goldman Sachs. The moment he catches a glimpse of the leggy old flame (Australian model Charlee Fraser) who dumped him for being such a manchild, Ben is determined to snatch her back from the happy-go-lucky Hemsworth (Joe Davidson) she brought as her plus one. If only there were a way for Bea to show Jonathan that she’s moved on, and for Ben to make Margaret jealous enough to give him a second chance…
If 72 hours doesn’t seem like enough time for Bea and Ben to pull off the whole “fake couple” routine, that’s because it obviously isn’t. But our star-crossed lovers are unknowingly helped in their endeavor by the brides themselves, who try to get them to like each other for real in a desperate bid to stop Bea and Ben from killing the vibes and possibly burning the house down in the process.
It’s the kind of farcical predicament that could only make sense on stage or screen, and “Anyone but You” actually works best when it leans harder towards the screwball comedies of the 1930s than it does the more grounded rom-coms they inspired at the end of the century. Gluck seems a bit gunshy about going off-mission in a way that stifles some of his movie’s best comic setpieces (a solid bit of physical comedy involving a cookie on the flight to Australia is cut short right when it’s starting to hit), but the fish out of water aspect of Americans in Australia tees up a handful of satisfyingly broad gags about surfer boys and giant spiders, and the scenes where Pete and his family play-act in order to get Ben and Bea together are funny enough to make you understand why the trope has survived for almost 400 years.
It helps that Powell and Sweeney are both game for anything, as this story is packed with emergency stripping, multiple air-rescues, and frequent swims through shark-infested waters (“oh, you’re hot girl fit,” Bea cracks after learning that her marble-cut paramour has no cardio endurance). Alas, eagerness alone can only go so far, and the two leads aren’t equally well-suited to satisfy the demands of this vintage genre exercise.
Powell, who seems like he was crafted in a secret government lab where mad scientists spliced George Clooney and Matthew McConaughey’s DNA into a smooth wad of flesh they injected with nuclear creatine and industrial-grade charisma, was born for this kind of movie. Sweeney, an excellent actress whose performance in “Reality” confirmed that she has far more talent than “Euphoria” could ever hope to contain, is naturally wry and recessive in a way that makes it hard to disguise that she’s a Gen Z baby swimming in deep millennial waters; her performance is plenty believable, it just doesn’t always feel like it belongs in this kind of film.
That isn’t disastrous, as Sweeney is happy to revel in the rom-com pageantry of it all (Bea’s wardrobe includes several of the most stunning dresses you’ve ever seen, whereas Ben wears… collared shirts), and her character isn’t honest with herself about the kind of story she wants to be in, but Bea’s affect is still a bit too withdrawn to sell her reaction to any of the grand gestures Ben uses to win her over. It’s a shame that a rom-com so willing to invest itself in even its genre’s cheesiest tropes is often harder for us to invest in than it should be.
But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Besides, “Anyone but You” may not be funny or memorable enough to single-handedly make rom-coms matter again, but it might just inch us closer towards that goal precisely because it doesn’t burden itself with any such cross to bear. This is nothing more than an old-fashioned frivolity with newly minted stars and a killer supporting cast. Gluck and Ilana Wolpert’s toothless script is redeemed by its fine attention to detail, the movie’s confined story is splashed across a series of gorgeous locations, and cinematographer Danny Ruhlmann shoots them with the dramatic flair of someone who knows that people might actually have their phones off for long enough to appreciate his work.
Unlike its characters, “Anyone but You” refuses to lie to us — or — itself about what it wants to be, and that will be enough to convince a lot of the people who see it not to lie to themselves about the fact that we still want movies to be like this too.
Grade: B-
Sony Pictures Releasing will release “Anyone but You” in theaters on Friday, December 22.
