Anyone But You (2023)

Someone once said that romantic comedies are the hardest stories to execute, because you always know how it's going to end. Therefore it becomes about the journey and, for many romantic comedies, the chemistry between your two leads. Some films go for sweeping romance (The Notebook, Titanic etc), some go for something reflective of the times (The Apartment, 500 Days of Summer etc.), and some go for appealing to as many people as possible. This film certainly falls in the latter category. It makes no attempts to be anything other than a feel-good romantic comedy that everyone can enjoy.  

While this in itself is okay, you find yourself fully dependent on the strength of your two leads. In this case, the boy and girl on a complicated path to love and happiness are portrayed by Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell - two near-perfect physical specimens because god forbid we should ever want to watch two people who look terrible naked lead this kind of story - and the key question becomes, do we buy their chemistry enough to carry an entire film? 

The opening scene gets us off to a poor start, both actors showing the charm and wit of two lawn chairs. Admittedly, two beautiful, expensive lawn chairs, but lawn chairs nonetheless. Then follows a bizarre sequence of events which lead to our couple falling in love (apparently sleeping together and getting fully back dressed before falling asleep for the night) and, through a quite rudimentary misunderstanding, suddenly hating each other. All fairly standard and dislikable stuff so far. The story ends up in Australia for a wedding retreat and the couple are forced to pretend to like each other to try and lure the people they actually like to like them in return. Or something like that. In fact, the plot itself in this type of film is typically largely irrelevant. We just want to see some glamorous shots of Aus and enjoy spending time with the characters. This is where, for the most part, the film succeeds. Bryan Brown, Dermot Mulroney and Rachel Griffiths are always great, no matter how derivative the material. There are beauty shots aplenty and as a light-movie wherein we want to forget our troubles and enjoy the company of some wacky folk in a sun-soaked mansion, it just about ticks the box. 

Tonally, it is a muddled affair. The opening coffee shop sequence feels like it was shot and directed by the Hallmark Channel and it appears to set us up for 90 minutes of chicken soup for the soul. However, out of nowhere, we are presented with moments of bizarre late-90s gross-out style humour. For example, there is a baffling scene where the two leads are trying to convince everyone they are into each other and thus start fingering each other's arseholes. In public. And I'm not even making that up. There is also a completely unnecessary Australian stereotype surfer guy who shows us his 'anteater' for essentially no reason. Not to mention the softcore porn sequence where the two leads finally get intimate. None of this is inherently a bad idea, it just feels completely crow-barred in as a last-ditch attempt to add some sort of edge to proceedings. Head-scratching stuff. All of this coupled with the plot device of two people being relentlessly nasty to each other because they like each other leads to everything feeling a little haggard and confusing. 

These baffling shifts aside, the two leads manage to become less repulsive towards the end of the film and when the story stops focusing, for a moment, on being zany, puts down all the pretense, and lets our main couple have an adult conversation, all of sudden you start to quite like them both. It makes you wish that Will Gluck would've had the courage to stick with this tone from the start. By the end of the film, you start to pull for these two, which is remarkable given the coffee shop scene at the beginning and the bum-tampering sequence. 

Despite some serious mis-steps, effortless plot, and initially charmless lead pairing, the film just about pulls itself out of the mire and does what it's supposed to. Sometimes it's a Saturday night and you've had a long day and you just want to watch two people hotter than you living a life you can only dream of and hope they they can put aside their shallow, inconsequential issues to get together and live happily ever after. Sometimes you don't want a deconstructed lobster salad, you just want a quarter pounder with cheese. As a film in this context it just about stays satisfies the urge, despite there being many better offerings in the genre. 

★★☆☆☆

JB.