*Spoilers for Anyone But You ahead!*
Let me start off by saying, that it’s really hard for me to hate a movie.
As long as I’m having fun and I’m enjoying myself, I will say anything is a good movie because I’m not too picky. A lot of movies on my Letterboxd get at least three stars, but there’s always the rare occasion where I disliked a movie so much that I was literally counting down the minutes until the credits started rolling.
The latest movie that disappointed me this much was Anyone But You, the new romantic comedy starring Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell. It’s based off of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, and I love it when modern films take inspiration from old classics. However, this one really fell flat for me. I might be coming off as extremely overdramatic, but I think that’s because I thought this movie would be a little better than it was, and the actors and crew were hyping it up, only for it to not live up to what they were saying.
The beginning was promising; Sydney and Glen’s characters — Bea and Ben — have your typical meet-cute in a coffee shop. She needs to use the restroom, but it’s only for paying customers, so he pretends to be her husband buying her a tea so they let her through. After that, they go back to his house and goof off, they have a one-night stand, and she leaves in the morning. But she decides to go back, and Bea overhears a conversation Ben is having with his friend about how much Bea sucks for leaving, and the two begin resenting each other.
A long while later, Bea and Ben meet up at a bar to celebrate the engagement of Bea’s sister to Ben’s friend. After their first (and only) encounter, they absolutely hate each other and spend the night arguing. There’s another jump ahead to the wedding trip, which is in Australia. The time jumps confused me a bit because it wasn’t explicit about just how much time had passed and why Bea and Ben hated each other as if they’d been acquaintances for months or years, and that’s something I didn’t really like.
Other than the time inconsistency, this whole setup was fine, it was like your regular rom-com, but after that, everything started going downhill for me. The writing started getting sloppy and lazy, and every character just became generally unlikeable. The plotline felt choppy, it began getting awkward, and the line deliveries felt very off.
Bea and Ben spend every single day of the trip fighting, ruining every single activity, game, and event that the family has planned. Bea’s parents also invite her ex to the wedding, and they hassle her about law school, which she dropped out of. The only person who knows she quit law school is Ben, adding even more tension which leads to more arguing. This annoys everyone, and the family members decide that the only way to get them to stop hating each other is for them to fall in love.
They set up this elaborate plan to trick Ben and Bea into thinking that they’re into one another — which Bea catches on to. She talks to Ben and says that they should flip the script and pretend that the family’s plan worked to get them off their backs and to remain neutral for the rest of the trip so the wedding can go smoothly.
Now, I really enjoyed this aspect of the movie; I love the fake dating trope and I thought it was a really good idea to have them trick their families into thinking the plan worked. This idea had a lot of potential, and I was hoping that it would play out well. However, right off the bat, the acting and dialogue seemed so overdone that I don’t know how their families even believed them.
Throughout the rest of the movie, in typical rom-com fashion, they grow to hate each other less and less. However, on the day of the wedding, Bea’s parents find out she’s no longer in law school, and she blames him for telling them when it was actually his best friend who spilled the beans. This fight causes chaos to ensue, and the cake gets knocked over, ruining the start of what was supposed to be a good day. I love conflict, so I got more intrigued here, only to be let down again.
Honestly, I don’t remember what happened after that until Bea and Ben made up and the credits rolled with all of the characters dancing to “Unwritten” by Natasha Beddingfield. I hate that I forgot, but at the same time, I did start zoning in and out after a while.
Maybe my review and my thoughts are overdramatic, but I genuinely did not like how the writers thought Glen and Sydney had great enough chemistry to make up for the lack of a good script (Side note: they don’t!). I also felt like sometimes the writers just wanted to oversexualize Sydney at certain points throughout the movie by giving her ill-fitting bikinis or dresses to show off her cleavage. She gets enough of that in Euphoria, and I was hoping she’d escape it for this movie.
However, despite all of this negativity, I can say that there was a scene that I really liked. At one point Bea falls off a yacht into the ocean. Ben jumps in to save her even though he’s horrible at swimming, and it’s hard to see because it’s late at night. They get airlifted out of the water, but he’s scared of heights, so Bea starts singing “Unwritten” to calm him down since that’s his favorite song.
Besides that, the movie was forgettable in some parts and just overall trashy, but not in a good way. I was talking with my friend, and she said trashy movies are only passable if the lead actors mesh well together, and I agree. The entire movie felt dissonant and it was like they only had one day to film everything.
All in all, this movie could have been better, but it was bogged down by half-done acting performances and substandard writing. I think a lot of its hype came from the dating rumors that sparked about Sydney and Glen because it definitely does not hold its own.
I can only hope the next big rom-com isn’t as much of a letdown.