Imagined pitch meeting: “We do a glossy and R-rated update on Shakespeare’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ with the whole Fake Dating scenario, and we’ll fill it with beautiful people who are constantly dropping the f-bomb and baring lots of skin. It’ll be a Fake Dating Rom-Com that might seem original if people haven’t seen ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ or ‘Pretty Woman’ or ‘How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days’ or ‘The Wedding Date’ or ‘The Proposal’ or ‘Just Go With It’ or ‘Holidate’ or ...”
I’m going to stop me right there and say I’ll give this much to “Anyone But You”: It leans HARD into the romantic comedy tropes, to the point that you might find yourself giving into the silliness and the over-the-top embracing of so many clichés. It’s like you’re getting bombarded with rom-com snowballs for the entire movie. Kudos to writer-director Will Gluck (“Easy A,” “Friends With Benefits”) for shooting this like a real theatrical movie and not just a straight-to-streamer quickie and to the ensemble actors who throw themselves into the material, but the material eventually sinks because the leads played by Sydney Sweeney (“Euphoria”) and Glen Powell (“Top Gun: Maverick”) are borderline terrible people much of the time, and the chemistry between these two gorgeous actors gets a C+ at best.
