Anyone but You - A Review: Sydney Sweeney Busts Out

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Despite Sydney Sweeney’s breast efforts, this movie falls flat.

Anyone but You, the rom-com starring Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell, hit theatres back in December and became a bona fide box office sensation. I missed Anyone but You in theatres but it’s now on Netflix and I just watched it…and I have some thoughts.

The film, written and directed by Will Gluck, tells the story of Bea (Sweeney) and Ben (Powell), two attractive people who had a magical meet cute but then for some moronic reason now hate each other and are forced to attend a getaway wedding in Australia. In order to stave off prying parents and make ex-lovers jealous, Bea and Ben decide to pretend to be a couple at this wedding…which of course is not just a lesbian wedding but an inter-racial lesbian wedding because we live in a pandering hellscape.

The premise of the film is absurd to the point of abject stupidity, and the filmmaking on display is at best amateurish…so why did this film make $219 million at the box office. I’ll tell you why…because Sydney Sweeney is a force of nature…or more accurately stated, Sydney Sweeney’s magnificently magnetic mouth-watering melons are a force of nature and may in fact be so perfect as to be the epicenter around which the known universe rotates.

I’m kidding…sort of. Sydney Sweeney is an odd duck…she’s certainly beautiful and sexy…and her ample bosoms are the greatest thing this country has produced in the last 200 years…but she also talks like she has a hearing impairment and has the facial expressions of the new kid in the special ed class.

To her great credit though she is totally game and up for anything to try and get a laugh in this movie…most of the time she fails miserably but it is her commitment to the buffoonish bits that makes her such an appealing and compelling screen presence.

Sweeney is sort of a cross between Bridget Bardot and Jennifer Lawrence. She’s not as naturally gregarious or hot-girl-next-door-ish as Lawrence or as incandescently sexy as Bardot, but she’s got roughly 25% of each woman within her and that makes her 50% interesting.

Sweeney’s co-star, Glen Powell, is poised to be the next “it” guy and it’s easy to see why in this movie. He’s certainly handsome in a rather boring and sterile way, but like his co-star he too is down to do whatever needs be done to make a bit funny. Again, the bits rarely if ever work, but Powell’s commitment to them is very endearing.

Powell feels like a hybrid between Matthew McConaughey and Ryan Gosling. He’s sort of a safe version of the lesser parts of both men. Powell isn’t as charming and sexy as McConaughey or as funny and talented as Gosling, but he’s sort of in the same ballpark…if it’s a really, really big ballpark…like the Big House in Michigan – home to the NCAA Football National Champion University of Michigan Wolverines (Go Blue!).

Despite the charms of Sweeney and Powell, Anyone but You is, frankly, dreadful. It is painfully stupid, poorly shot, and except for Sweeney and Powell, exceedingly poorly acted. For example, GaTa, who plays the lesbian bride’s brother and Ben’s friend, may be the worst actor I’ve seen in a feature film in the last decade. This guy is so awful it felt like a mentally ill homeless man wandered on to the set and no one had the heart to ask him to leave.

But in GaTa’s defense, much better actors didn’t fare any better. For example, veteran actors Bryan Brown and Dermot Mulroney both give astonishingly poor performances that are not just awful but embarrassing. Brown and Mulroney’s performances feel like they’re from two people who’ve never seen a movie, never mind acted in one. The once promising Rachel Griffiths doesn’t fare any better.

The truth is that the only reason to watch this witless movie is to spend two hours with Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell. Whatever Sweeney’s and Powell’s faults as actors the one thing that is undeniable about them is that they are both extremely likable…and in today’s watered-down movie culture that’s more than enough to pass as a “movie star”.

Anyone can guess what the future holds for Sweeney and Powell. Sweeney, who was quite good in HBO’s Euphoria and The White Lotus, needs to navigate the perilous minefield that is being a sex symbol in our current culture, no easy task as being so sexually appealing to men can often turn the female audience against an actress. She and her team will need to figure out how to make men want her and women relate to her – something Anyone but You successfully accomplishes. One hopes that she can find her way and build a career filled with much better films and interesting roles…she certainly has shown flashes of the talent and skill required to become an actress of impact.  

Glen Powell seems to have a much lower ceiling than Sydney Sweeney, but a much higher floor only because he is not the type of actor men will dislike since he isn’t one of those grating Hollywood pansy-ass pretty boys. Powell’s greatest strength is that he seems to be a good dude…and while he is good looking, he isn’t too good-looking…hence the high floor/low ceiling.

As for Anyone but You and whether you should watch it…well…I can’t imagine telling anyone that they need to see this movie. It is instantly forgettable and aggressively idiotic. It’s the type of movie you watch on a plane when there’s nothing else available, or when you’re on the couch recovering from surgery and can’t quite reach the remote without bursting your sutures.

The bottom line is that Anyone but You is a bad movie, but years from now we might look back on it as the big box office breakout for the biggest, breastiest movie star of all time, Sydney Sweeney, and say “thanks for the mammaries”…I certainly hope so.

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