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Anyone but You (2024)

 


Going into Anyone but You (2024), I expected to either be delighted by or despise the film. Thankfully, I was delighted. However, this apprehension reflects the baggage this film has accumulated, baggage well in excess of its dainty frame. For a movie as lightweight as Anyone but You, it’s become heavily and conspicuously entangled in ‘da discourse’ about 21st century movie stardom and romantic comedies, both routinely pronounced dead. The title of its Shakespearean source material, Much Ado About Nothing, proves apt to describe said discourse.

Directed by Will Gluck (Easy A, Annie, AACTA Award winner Peter Rabbit) and scripted by Gluck and Ilana Wolpert, the film pits Ben (Glen Powell) and Bea (Sydney Sweeney) against each other as modern-day spins on Much Ado About Nothing’s Benedick and Beatrice. Following mixed signals and miscommunications after a one-night stand, Ben and Bea are awkwardly reunited when Ben’s childhood friend (Alexandra Shipp) and Bea’s sister (Hadley Robinson) get married in Sydney (hence the film’s tenuous inclusion here on Down Under Flix). Seeing that their seething and sparring threatens to capsize the wedding, others in the wedding party (including Bryan Brown as a father of the bride) conspire to stir the warring duo to romance. As far as Shakespeare on film, it’s not as creative an Antipodean spin on the Bard as Geoffrey Wright’s Macbeth nor as fun as Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 take on Much Ado, but I’ll take it hands down over Joss Whedon’s 2011 film of the same play, exclusively starring Whedon’s friends and seemingly exclusively made for Whedon’s then-fawning fans.

Hollywood looks at Glen Powell and sees the next major movie star, capable of headlining rom-coms, quirky indies (Hitman), and IP reboots (Twisters) and retreads (Edgar Wright’s future The Running Man). I look at Glen Powell and see a B-grade Chris Evans, despite enjoying Powell’s work in Top Gun: Maverick and here. Whether Powell sticks the landing on a so-far-successful ascent to stardom remains to be seen; having undervalued or overestimated numerous other studio-manufactured stars and been either pleasantly or unpleasantly surprised by the results, I don’t care to speculate. Ultimately, for all Hollywood’s grooming, there’s a Darwinian, audience-driven survival of the fittest that separates the wheat from the chaff. But Powell’s a capable and self-effacing romantic leading man here, and Sydney Sweeney is similarly good and especially adept at some of the physical comedy.

Some genres fade for good reason—post-YouTube and CGI, once profitable real-animals-in-the-wild movies like Born Free, Milo and Otis, or Benji the Hunted are obsolete—but a healthy and rounded movie ecosystem needs rom-coms. Anyone but You is coarser than the Meg Ryan and Sandra Bullock vehicles that typified the genre in the 90s. I doesn’t go full Apatow grossout, but there’s an entertaining strain of venom in the warring banter of the couple; it’s not Shakespeare, but it’s wittier than expected. And if bickering duos falling in love or back into love at other people’s weddings in exotic seaside locales is now the coin of the realm of romantic comedy—see also the George Clooney/Julia Roberts pairing Ticket to Paradise—then Anyone but You's Sydney setting holds its own. I haven’t seen The Fall Guy—another Sydney-set Hollywood production of 2024 which likewise got messed up in (and lost) ‘da discourse’ about movie stardom and rom-coms—so can’t speak to that film, but within my frame of reference this might be the best Hollywood spotlight on Sydney as Sydney (as opposed to subbing for American city X) since Powell’s mentor Cruise shot Mission: Impossible II there. Having said that, my appreciation of this splashy mainstream Sydney-set American rom-com with emerging American stars was tempered by a melancholy recollection that in previous eras Australian directors made splashy mainstream Sydney-set Australian films (e.g. The Man from Hong Kong, Scobie Malone, Two Hands) with emerging or minted Australian stars and milked the city’s production value.

Ben 

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