Anyone but You

Directed by Will Gluck, Anyone but You follows Sydney Sweeney’s Bea and Glen Powell’s Ben as they pretend to be a couple to placate their friends and family. Filmmaker Gluck, armed with a script written alongside Ilana Wolpert, admittedly does a terrific job of initially luring the viewer into the progressively unwatchable proceedings, as the picture kicks off with a fun opening stretch that boasts a familiar yet undeniably irresistible meet-cute between the two characters – with the relatively promising atmosphere heightened by Gluck’s breezy, lighthearted approach to the well-worn material. It’s clear, then, that Anyone but You‘s slow-but-steady descent into total irrelevance is triggered by a repetitive and momentum-free midsection that contains few, if any, compelling attributes, and there’s little doubt that the arms-length atmosphere is compounded by a mostly irritating narrative (ie the movie seemingly sets a record for fake breakups) and the less-than-charismatic efforts of leads Sweeney and Powell (ie they’re both just so bland and annoying). (And this is to say nothing of GaTa’s nails-on-a-chalkboard work as Ben’s grating best friend.) By the time the eye-rolling and entirely ineffective upbeat conclusion rolls around, Anyone but You has confirmed its place as one of the more objectionable romcoms to come around in quite some time – which is a shame, ultimately, given that the genre tends to get short shrift nowadays.

*1/2 out of ****