When the romcom industrial complex is in need of a story, William Shakespeare is often there to save the day: 10 Things I Hate About You, She’s The Man and Get Over It all owe a debt to England’s greatest playwright. Anyone But You, a romantic comedy loosely based on Much Ado About Nothing, has the Immortal Bard’s fingerprints all over it, with his quotes (“Men were deceivers ever”, “Assume thy part in some disguise”) littered throughout the film, woven into the background. Within the first ten minutes, there’s a famous line from Romeo And Juliet inscribed on a wall, “Here's much to do with hate but more with love”, the film setting out its thematic stall from the off.
If only this had more to do with hate than love, it might have been more interesting. Instead, what we get is a suffocatingly contrived entry into cinema’s already most proudly formulaic canon, one which takes inspiration from Shakespeare in all the wrong ways. On paper, it’s a premise that could feel fun and different: two people who hate each other pretend to like each other, until all the pretending inevitably yields to actual feelings. In reality, it’s ultra-convoluted, has little to say about romance in any reality, and is largely unfunny.
If there’s a brightness to this film, it’s found in its two leads.
If there’s a brightness to this film, it’s found in its two leads. Rising stars Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell are officially two of the human race’s most beautiful representatives, both dripping with confidence and charisma, both destined to become giant A-listers, if they aren’t already. The film hungrily takes advantage of these facts. Director Will Gluck’s camera constantly traverses Sweeney and Powell’s toned, tanned bodies with a ludicrously lusty gaze, akin almost to a horny ’80s teen comedy. The swimsuit budget alone appears to be comparable to a small nation’s GDP.
Yet it all feels very skin-deep. Powell’s character Ben is described as a “gorgeous idiot” at one point, a rare bit of self-awareness for the film as a whole: this is all just a glossy bit of nothing. The film valiantly attempts to give both leads some klutzy physical comedy to temper their unrealistic standards of beauty: Sweeney engages in some Mr Bean-style crotch-drying; Powell swims like a nervous six-year-old.
Harebrained ‘fake-relationship’ schemes are no strangers to this genre, and there are plenty of nods to familiar tropes — a glamorous wedding, a grand final gesture, some egregious product placement, the word “serendipity”, Dermot Mulroney. It certainly meets the definition of the film it sets out to be, and will prove an easy, unchallenging watch for anyone looking for something to have on in the background. But there is none of the repartee of Howard Hawks, none of the sly sparkle of Nora Ephron, none of the sweet, self-deprecating romance of Richard Curtis, and barely, to use Shakespeare’s phrasing, a “skirmish of wit” to any of it. When the best thing about a film is its fourth-wall-breaking end-credits sequence, you’re not in a great shape.