‘Anyone But You’ Movie Review: Much Ado About Hot, Charming Stars
Photo from IMDb
From Jeremy Kibler
In the light-as-air, refreshingly R-rated romantic comedy Anyone But You, nothing goes better with William Shakespeare than hot people. The impossibly attractive Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney pretend to be impossibly attractive people who hate each other and then pretend to be in love before actually falling in love for real — got it? Writer-director Will Gluck (Easy A, Friends with Benefits) and co-writer Ilana Wolpert aren’t quite up to the standards of 10 Things I Hate About You (or even the under-seen Get Over It and Deliver Us From Eva) with their contemporary Bard revamp, but it all boils down to likable leads carrying the day.
Ben (Powell) is a hot finance bro, and Bea (Sweeney) is a hot law student. After a meet-cute at a coffee shop that leads to a great evening of eating grilled cheese, talking, and falling asleep in each other’s arms with their belt buckles untouched, a misunderstanding pits these two against one another. With this being a movie—and a loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing”—Ben and Bea (much like Benedick and Beatrice) must both attend a destination wedding in Sydney, Australia; he’s best friends with the bride, Claudia (Alexandra Shipp), and her sister, Halle (Hadley Robinson), is the other bride. As Movie Contrivance would have it, Bea’s meddlesome parents (Dermot Mulroney, Rachel Griffiths) have invited her hot ex-fiancé, Jonathan (Darren Barnet), and Ben’s hot Aussie ex, Margaret (Charlee Fraser), is a bridesmaid. The families think Ben and Bea have chemistry, so they try playing cupid, and Ben and Bea decide to play along. A “skirmish of wit” ensues!
For the better, Anyone But You does feel like a throwback to the romantic comedies of the early aughts, and its success has much to do with the stars, individually and as an on-screen pair. Powell could come across as smarmy with that toothsome grin, but he’s extremely charming, and Sweeney is charismatic with an untapped knack for physical comedy (her hijinks with a bathroom hand dryer and in an airplane seat are both nimbly played). There’s only a little to each of these characters—Ben’s mother died, and Bea doesn’t really want to be a lawyer and doesn’t know how to let a grilled cheese cool down before taking a bite—but they do have a tart, snappy banter (not in iambic pentameter) and an instant heat between them. The problem is, the conflicts are mighty flimsy, and there isn’t much tension or chemistry between Ben and Bea and their respective exes. We always know that our good-looking leads will be getting together, no questions asked, and that’s okay.
Anyone But You isn’t particularly funny, but it’s not unfunny, either. The fake-being-a-couple charade is actually less dumb than it could have been with a few amusing payoffs to broad comic set-pieces (i.e. a tarantula down Ben’s pants and a botched Titanic moment on a yacht), and Gluck proves to be a Natasha Bedingfield fan once again. The supporting cast is also solid, particularly rap artist GaTa as Ben’s friend Pete (and brother to one of the brides); Joe Davidson as Beau, Margaret’s muscles-for-brains surfer fling; and Michelle Hurd and Bryan Brown, as Claudia and Pete’s mother and stepfather. A fizzy, frisky escape with two immensely watchable stars in a desirable destination is what some moviegoers will crave during this holiday season, and Anyone But You offers nothing more and nothing less.
Rating: 3/5
Anyone But You is currently in theaters.
