Movie Review: Anyone But You

The good news about the new movie “Anyone But You” is that it covers an important area of relationships that I have rarely seen addressed in any film. From the beginning this story is about the fear of getting hurt, previous relationship dissapointment and painful breakups. What human beings do to avoid getting hurt to save their ego and most importantly, how relationship misunderstandings (that are very often easily fixed) can ruin a rare chance in our lifetimes, in finding true love.

Anyone But You stars Sydney Sweeney as Bea and Glen Powell as Ben, who meet at a Starbucks and almost immediately find out that they are extremely attracted to each other. Unfortunately after a one night stand, life steps in, as it often does, and things to do not progress as it should have – due to the fear that Bea experiences due to a previous breakup and subsequent misunderstandings that could have been avoided. How often in life is something as great as true love destroyed due to something that is overheard, or misunderstood that prevents two people from finding love in their lifetimes.

The rest of this story is more about a typical romantic comedy where too many of the comedic events and dialogue fall flat. Through a series of unlikely coincidences, Ben and Bea find themselves attending a wedding in Austrailia with common friends. While in Austrailia a series of crazy events start, and Ben and Bea try to fool all their friends and family members trying to convince them that they are in fact a couple, when they are at odds with each other. They do this to try and stop their friends from interfering in their lives. Most of this fails to be funny or even entertaining too much of the time.

What does work is the chemistry between Ben and Bea with Sydney Sweeney stealing this movie with her rare and exceptional movie star looks that might just make her a major and in demand movie actress in the future.

There is a scene that involves a spider and nudity with Glen Powell’s character that was an all too obvious attempt at bringing in more movie goers with a gratutious nude scene, and an attempt at crude humor that fails miserably. This spider scene was all about saving the box office that is most likely to be a failure with the main reason being once again, the bad screenplay. The idea with this scene is to add it to the movie trailer to “trick the wrong people” into attending a movie that could have been much better had a good screenplay been written.

I also thought that the ending was rather ridiculous, invoving a helicopter to try and avoid anything that might have been thought of as “seen this before”. Understandably for all of these obvious reasons, the Rotten Tomatoes rating for this movie is a low 58% with my rating at 70% and a recommendation, only because of Sydney Sweeny who just might have found her inroad into becomming a significant movie actress.