Anyone But You (2023) Movie Review: We meet Bea (Sydney Sweeney), a young woman aiming to be a lawyer who is confused about her direction and purpose in life, which we are told numerous times throughout the movie. She meets Ben (Glen Powell) in a coffee shop meet-cute. Ben is charming enough to make you wonder whether he’s a serial killer, but there’s not much else to his personality. His sparsely decorated and barely lived-in home looks as if he actually could be. Following classic rom-com logic, Bea follows a man she met for the first time to his apartment, talking and laughing the entire way.
Suspension of disbelief aside, the character interactions are cheesily cute: they cook dinner together, giggle, and straddle each other. We get the chance to almost relate to the characters and get a better glimpse of their personhood and chemistry with each other, but we don’t. Instead, all their talk and laughter are shown through a montage, with physicality being the only indicator of their affection. The audience is essentially an outsider to a moment that should have been used to show why they have fallen for each other and not just have our leads tell us.
Despite the date having gone well, Bea sneaks away the following day, unaware that Ben is awake. As she’s on the phone with her sister talking about the amazing night, in comes Ben’s best friend and comic relief, Pete (GaTa). After uncovering that Ben talked about his mother on the first date, Pete drops the L word, not showing but telling the audience that the two characters love each other from this one encounter. With conveniently wide open doors and almost supernatural hearing, our leads enter a misunderstanding that carries over when they meet again six months later.
Bea’s sister, Halle (Hadley Robinson), and Ben’s friend, Claudia (Alexandra Shipp), are in a relationship, and the crew all meet to introduce one another formally. The animus between our two leads is immediate, as they exchange aggressive insults towards each other. Yet the delivery of their lines felt like exactly that: lines they must rattle off verbatim. There’s no flow or emotion to their words. In an effort to emulate their take on the Shakespearean tale “Much Ado About Nothing,” Bea and Ben toss around words like “fuckboy” and “disaster,” but there’s nothing witty about it.
“Anyone But You” leans into the raunchy side of the romance, often using it for comedic effect. The gratuitous sexual scenes that aimed for laughs and attempted to be playful ended up just being uncomfortable to sit through. That isn’t to say the movie is void of any humor. When Halle and Claudia end up getting married, Bea and Ben are forced to interact with each other for the sake of the wedding. Disaster strikes when their animosity causes literal flames, and the families decide the two need to just bone and get over their love-hate relationship. Cue the exaggerated shenanigans the parents and children undergo, including staging conversations that try to make Ben and Bea believe that the other is in love with them after all this time.
Seeing Bea and Ben repeatedly trying to convince their families that they are in a real relationship was entertaining. They try with all their might to be affectionate–rubbing each other’s bodies, nuzzling against necks, normal things couples do. But the odds just aren’t in their favor, with a huntsman spider in Ben’s pants and the family instead fawning over a koala the entire time. Glen Powell goes all in with this scene, flinging his clothes and screaming at the top of his lungs when he notices the spider. The over-the-topness of the scene is classic rom-com when the worst that could possibly happen does happen. It is a little disappointing, however, when this is the most personality we see from Ben, other than the douchebag persona he proudly flaunts.
“Anyone But You” succeeds for the most part with its comedy, but the romance is surprisingly where it falls short. Part of it is due to the fact that we have no connection to any of the characters. Because the side characters either just fulfill tropes or conveniently nudge our leads to realize their feelings at the right time, they are ultimately forgettable and have no heart of their own. Bea and Ben lack the chemistry necessary to sell to the audience that their love story is genuine and pure romance and not just based on lust. Any “looks of love” that the two share seem to be when they look hot in a dress or show off their ripped body, not intimate moments.
Even when the leads try to be affectionate, they end up sticking fingers in orifices. While it gets the laugh from the audience, “Anyone But You” is a prime example of what happens when two attractive people are plopped next to each other and are expected to act in love. We get a porn-com and leave with no lingering attachment to the people we watched for almost two hours.
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