Imagined pitch meeting: “We do a glossy and R-rated update on Shakespeare’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ with the whole Fake Dating scenario, and we’ll fill it with beautiful people who are constantly dropping the f-bomb and baring lots of skin. It’ll be a Fake Dating Rom-Com that might seem original if people haven’t seen ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ or ‘Pretty Woman’ or ‘How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days’ or ‘The Wedding Date’ or ‘The Proposal’ or ‘Just Go With It’ or ‘Holidate’ or ...”
I’m going to stop me right there and say I’ll give this much to “Anyone But You”: It leans HARD into the romantic comedy tropes, to the point that you might find yourself giving in to the silliness and the over-the-top embracing of so many clichés. It’s like you’re getting bombarded with rom-com snowballs for the entire movie. Kudos to writer-director Will Gluck (“Easy A,” “Friends With Benefits”) for shooting this like a real theatrical movie and not just a straight-to-streamer quickie and to the ensemble actors who throw themselves into the material, but the material eventually sinks because the leads played by Sydney Sweeney (“Euphoria”) and Glen Powell (“Top Gun: Maverick”) are borderline terrible people much of the time, and the chemistry between these two gorgeous actors gets a C+ at best.
“Anyone But You” kicks off with a dopey Coffee Shop Meet Cute between Sweeney’s Bea, a law student, and Powell’s Ben, a financial bro guy. They have a magical first date in which they eat grilled cheese sandwiches and just talk the night away, falling asleep with their clothes on, but then there’s the obligatory Big Misunderstanding, which isn’t really much of a misunderstanding and could have been cleared up in a two-minute conversation. Anyway, they dual-ghost each other.
Cut to a year later. Bea’s sister Halle (Hadley Robinson) is getting married to Ben’s friend Claudia (Alexander Shipp) and it’s a destination wedding in Sydney, which means Bea and Ben are going to have to spend a lot of time together and even pretend to date one another, for reasons too complicated to explain here. Problem is, they have an irrationally intense hatred for one another; it’s as if one of them killed the other’s cat or something. This leads to both Bea and Ben behaving like selfish, narcissistic and childish idiots in one slapstick scenario after another, which makes it kinda tough to root for either of them.
Dermot Mulroney (speaking of “The Wedding Date,” among other romcoms) and Rachel Griffiths play Bea’s parents, who are creepily obsessed with reuniting Bea with her ex, Jonathan (Darren Barnet). Bryan Brown and Michelle Hurd are Claudia’s parents, who are obscenely wealthy and hosting the entire wedding party. The rapper known as GaTa is Pete, who tries to have a conversation with a koala bear. There’s a giant wedding cake, and I’ll bet you can guess the fate of that wedding cake. Charlee Fraser is Margaret, who is Ben’s ex and is first seen topless at the beach, because this is a film that embraces nudity and has everyone saying the f-word all the time.
We know exactly where this is going, but all the way through the wedding, Bea and Ben remain self-consumed, and Ben’s big gesture of love at the end makes him seem more like an irresponsible, lawbreaking moron than a dashing romantic. On top of all that, this film tries really, really, REALLY hard to turn Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten” into a thing, but that’s actually kind of a difficult tune to sing. As someone once said about fetch, stop trying to make “Unwritten” happen, it’s not going to happen.
