Anyone But You (2023) Review

Bea and Ben meet in a coffee place and go on to spend the day and night together, falling asleep but she then bolts and naturally they then find out they have mutal friends. Having to travel to a destination wedding in Australia …

⭐️

The inital meeting between the pair was ok, I mean we probably could have done without Bea begging to use the toilet and then not having to stand in a queue to order something and get the key. Then a cute guy is talking to her so she kinda forgets about it a little bit longer, at this point I just knew the film wasn’t going to work or get much better.

I really do love romantic comedies as well, but they now seem to be very difficult to get right which is proven constantly throughout this mess of a film. If you don’t have the blend of chemistry, nice moments with some laughs mixed it, it will dramatically fail.

Moving the trauma to Australia and having to constantly remind the viewer that we are in Australia by constantly showing the Sydney Opera house in every other shot (ok, that is an exaggeration but they use it a lot). The fact that a wedding from the US is taking place in Australia just shows that these people must have a lot of money. Ben just happens to be best friends with Claudia who is marrying Bea’s sister Halle. We then have two families thrown together with Bea’s parents inviting her ex Jonathan to the wedding as well, as they love him.

The risk of the hatred between Bea and Ben is running a risk of spoiling the wedding, so everyone attempts to then get them together, which they work out and then try to play the whole thing back. Yeah, getting rather silly but to be brutally honest I just didn’t care. They were nice or likeable people at all and I guess that means they deserved one another?

The film is very loosely based on Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” with quotations from it in the background at times and in all honesty that feels like even more of an insult to one of the greatest playwrights in history, with some incredible lines to then even loosley associate him with the overuse of “f**kboy” constantly in the film. That leads to the swearing, was it just put in for effect to try and make the film more “grown up” and get a 15 rating as just felt unnecessary and out of place.

The main thing that destroyed the film for me was Sydney Sweeney’s performance, honestly everything about it was awful. The tone of her whinny voice, in general pathetic nature and looking like it was just painful to be in the film as well. You must have a good leading actress for a rom-com to work! The Glen Powell just felt out of place as well, mainly because the lack of chemistry between the pair. I think a focus on Alexandra Shipp and Hadley Robinson’s characters would have made a more enjoyable film. Dermot Mulroney’s presence made me wish I had just watched My Best Friends Wedding again.