ANYONE BUT YOU

 After a first date ends badly, Ben (Glen Powell) and Bea (Sydney Sweeney) decide that they hate each other. The pair are soon forced to get along, however, at the wedding of Bea’s sister and Ben’s best friend. In order to keep up appearances — and make their exes jealous — they pretend to be in a relationship.

Within the first ten minutes, there’s a famous line from Romeo And Juliet inscribed on a wall, “Here's much to do with hate but more with love”, the film setting out its thematic stall from the off.

If only this had more to do with hate than love, it might have been more interesting. Instead, what we get is a suffocatingly contrived entry into cinema’s already most proudly formulaic canon, one which takes inspiration from Shakespeare in all the wrong ways. On paper, it’s a premise that could feel fun and different: two people who hate each other pretend to like each other, until all the pretending inevitably yields to actual feelings. In reality, it’s ultra-convoluted, has little to say about romance in any reality, and is largely unfunny.

If there’s a brightness to this film, it’s found in its two leads. Rising stars Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell are officially two of the human race’s most beautiful representatives, both dripping with confidence and charisma, both destined to become giant A-listers, if they aren’t already. The film hungrily takes advantage of these facts. Director Will Gluck’s camera constantly traverses Sweeney and Powell’s toned, tanned bodies with a ludicrously lusty gaze, akin almost to a horny ’80s teen comedy. The swimsuit budget alone appears to be comparable to a small nation’s GDP.

Yet it all feels very skin-deep. Powell’s character Ben is described as a “gorgeous idiot” at one point, a rare bit of self-awareness for the film as a whole: this is all just a glossy bit of nothing. The film valiantly attempts to give both leads some klutzy physical comedy to temper their unrealistic standards of beauty: Sweeney engages in some Mr Bean-style crotch-drying; Powell swims like a nervous six-year-old.

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