A few months ago, there was much internet hullaballo about the first trailer for Anyone But You, which made the movie look like a rom-com but with the music and mood of a murder mystery. The one thing everyone could agree on was that both leads were insanely hot: as in, you feel slightly insane looking at either one of them because the human eye can't handle that much perfection. I mean, look at that poster. Top tier hotties, both of them.
You know how Arnold Schwarzenegger made a bunch of movies where he's just an average suburban dad and no one ever comments on the fact that he's an enormous Austrian man? This movie is kind of like that. Both of these two shockingly attractive people are just walking around in the world, acting as if they have normie problems like "I can't decide what to do with my life" and "I have trouble telling people when I'm interested in them," as if these two wouldn't constantly be approached with modeling contracts and marriage proposals. Despite the weirdness of the trailer, this is a by-the-numbers rom-com that leans heavily on gorgeous stars in a gorgeous setting to make up for a thin plot vaguely based on "Much Ado About Nothing."
Bea (Sydney Sweeney) and Ben (Glen Powell) meet at a coffee shop and spend a magical evening together before falling asleep together on Ben's couch. In the morning, Bea leaves for absolutely no reason, and Ben talks shit about her leaving for absolutely no reason, and then they are enemies for life. Just go with it, okay? When they are both invited to a destination wedding in Australia, their constant bickering threatens to sour the happy party, so their friends and family try to trick them into thinking they like each other. But they figure it out immediately and decide to pretend they like each other anyway, which leads to all sorts of hijinks that require them to rub against each other in revealing outfits.
I spent much of this movie thinking about whether I would want to attend this wedding. On the one hand, the whole wedding party is staying in Sydney in a fantastic house owned by one of the bride's fathers. The guests seem to do nothing but swim and tan and nibble at catered spreads, all while framed by gorgeous beach views and dressed in either bathing suits or designer gowns. So, all that sounds great. But on the other hand, I'm not actually a designer gown sort of person, and my bathing suit is like eight years old and smells permanently of hot springs, and the idea of being trapped into forced family fun for a week during my precious vacation actually sounds like a nightmare. This might have been a better movie with leads who felt uncomfortable amid all the beauty and wealth, because they would have been more relatable. But it wouldn't have looked as pretty.
And while we're looking, I'll just mention that you get to see almost all of both leads 👀🥵😍. If you want to see two super hot people being super hot on screen together, this is worth seeing. But there's not much to it plot-wise, despite the attempt to map it onto the plot of "Much Ado About Nothing." Hollywood has successfully mined that plot before, and I've done my own interpretation, but this just feels like a lazy attempt to add depth to a story that doesn't earn it.
They are super hot though. Can't say that enough.
Speaking of hot people you probably shouldn't trust… If the gorgeous, inexplicably complicated people in Anyone But You are your thing, you might enjoy Christmas With the Campbells, where Justin Long plays a handsome small-town guy whose folksy charm gets increasingly suspicious the longer you listen to him talk.