Anyone But You

I’ve always liked romcoms. Even as a child, when I was certainly influenced by society’s thoughts on the types of movies boys my age were “supposed” to like, I nonetheless loved their combination of sweet and silly. On one of my few trips to a drive-in theater, I was distressed to find out that The 40 Year Old Virgin was up second, following some romcom I’d never heard of. But Must Love Dogs became one of my favorite films, one of the few DVDs I owned, which I showed to girlfriends throughout high school and college (ironically, I hated The 40 Year Old Virgin). Although nothing outshone my adoration of The Wedding Singer, which I still endlessly quote. Admittedly, my romcom intake wasn’t super broad, and I missed most of the big ones from the 90s: for example, I still haven’t seen You’ve Got Mail. But the ones I saw, I usually enjoyed.

As the years have passed, I’ve found fewer and fewer grabbed me. Sure, there have been some great ones, such as Hitch and The Proposal and even Just Friends (although that last one might not hold up). But over the past decade, I’ve far more often found the premises overly simplistic or too self-aware. As such, I began gravitating more towards the nuance and complexity of straight-up romances instead, or intense personal dramas, which of course often involve romance. Granted, it might not be a coincidence that this coincided with the death of the romcom.

So when Anyone But You started getting some positive critical buzz, I was intrigued. The trailer looked like boring stupid trash, yes, but trailers can be wrong.

Bea (Sydney Sweeney) and Ben (Glenn Powell) meet by chance in a coffee shop, and spend a magical day and night together. Bea sneaks out early the next morning, but comes back in time to overhear Ben dismissing her as a “one-night nothing” to his best friend and roommate, Pete (GaTa). Months later, they’re brought back together by circumstance: Bea’s sister Halle (Hadley Robinson) is marrying Pete’s sister Claudia (Alexandra Shipp), so they’re all going to Australia for a week. Of course, their embarrassment over that night has calcified into disdain, so they’re constantly at each other’s throats. To prevent them from ruining everything, the brides and their families conspire to trick the rivals into thinking each fancies the other.

Sound familiar? It should. The setting and names are modernized (barely), and we’re given a more concrete (albeit thin) reason for them to verbally spar, but the framework’s the same…almost. There’s a twist: everyone is so obvious about their plot that Bea and Ben immediately figure out what’s going on. However, they decide to play along. Bea in order to get her parents (Dermot Mulroney and Rachel Griffiths) off her back about reuniting with her ex John (Darren Barnet), and Ben in order to make his ex Margaret (Charlee Fraser) jealous, because he wants to reunite.

That might sound a bit convoluted, with its layers of deception and dozen or so characters, but as is true of proper Shakespeare, it’s pretty easy to follow while watching it play out.

That said, no one is going to mistake this script for a timeless classic. The jokes are either lowest common denominator, obvious to the point that you know them instinctively, which robs them of their humor. Or else they’re random, out of nowhere retorts which make barely any sense. The witty rapport at the heart of Much Ado About Nothing, which is a big part of convincing us that Beatrice and Benedick actually admire one another, is replaced by clunky dick jokes and internet-style dunks. The characters all serve their roles well enough, but none of them are really fleshed out people, just doing what the script requires.

That being said, it has two modes in which it works best. One, which it uses quite sparingly, is leaning into the corniness of romcoms and what people expect from them. For example, when Bea instructs Ben to “Titanic me”, or when he dives into the water to save her even though she’s a far better swimmer than he is. In that same vein are references to famous romances, such as the aforementioned Titanic, when Leo comments on the handprints on the cabinets.

But honestly, I found it most effective when it was being earnest. The screenwriters doled out these pieces of connection at solid intervals, and took somewhat creative paths to get there. Nothing earth-shattering, but takes on scenes that I have seen before using flavors and details I haven’t. For example, Ben’s anecdote about the wrench on his mantle serves as an indication of what their night together meant to him. I actually teared up a few times during these sweet moments, despite how often I was rolling my eyes between them.

Because while the pacing and plot beats are well done, the minute to minute is boring. The jokes are bad and drawn out, the dialog was cribbed from a cantankerous TikTok video, and the misunderstandings present in every romcom are incredibly lazily executed, with no real attempt to make them land as anything other than contrived. It doesn’t help that Sweeney sleepwalks her way through the role, sounding bored from start to finish, her eyes often half-closed. As executive producer, you’d expect her to bring her A-game, and I sincerely hope this isn’t it. Powell does better due to his natural ease and charisma, although even he can’t make much of this weak script.

One more thing I have to mention: the end credits. It’s probably the second best of the year, behind only the back half of the Renfield credits. For each card, we’re treated to some extension of a scene from the movie in which the characters involved sing some part of Unwritten by Natasha Bedingfield. which both flows from the very last scene and is a callback to earlier in the movie. Be it Sweeney looking up at Powell’s taint while he covers himself, Pete and Roger dancing side by side and arm in arm, or Halle singing to Carol in front of flowers on fire. It’s goofy, it’s delightful, and it really tells you just how much of a blast the whole cast was having on set.

Listen, the praise this movie’s been getting is overblown. It’s indicative of just how starved for theatrical romcoms people are. A solid structure can’t make up for bad acting, poor writing, and lack of creativity. But it’s way better than I thought it would be. Derivative as it may be, basing your story on Shakespeare is a tried and true method for creating a classic. Which this isn’t: it will quickly be forgotten, of that I’m certain. But if you’re looking to stare at absurdly hot people do an interpretation of the Bard’s work for 90 minutes, you could certainly do worse.