Enemies to Lovers & Fake Dating All In One
By Jana Neimanns
Rating: 3/5
Anyone But You is a new romantic comedy based on one of romance’s most popular tropes: enemies to lovers. As the title and trailer suggest, at its core this movie’s goal is to convince viewers that, with love, anything is possible, even if that love comes from an unlikely source. However, while the romance community loves to read a story about enemies falling in love, I’m not sure this trope works quite as well on screen.
The main characters in Anyone But You are Ben and Bea, played by Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney. The movie opens with Ben and Bea meeting for the first time. While they have a great first date, sadly, miscommunications and assumptions about each other ruin Ben and Bea’s potential love story. Both characters are angry with one another and quickly become sworn enemies. Years later, after they are both invited to the same wedding, Bea and Ben agree to start a fake relationship in order to avoid looking single around their family and friends. The movie continues to follow Ben and Bea’s fake relationship as their friend’s wedding provides the perfect backdrop for romance.
Anyone But You is loosely based on Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado About Nothing. Quotes from the play are subtly included in the movie, with some lines painted on walls or drawn in sand at the beach, for example. The writer and director, Will Gluck, took inspiration from Shakespeare and combined this with his experience working on other movies, such as Friends With Benefits and Easy A.
Alexandra Shipp and Hadley Robinson play Caudia and Halle, the couple getting married in the movie. While only secondary characters, these actresses did a fantastic job of convincing me that they were truly in love. These characters were well cast and balanced the chaotic energy of Ben and Bea.
While Shipp and Robinson were wonderful, Sweeney and Powell were not as convincing as a couple.
Their chemistry was not as obvious as it should have been, and Sweeney in particular did not deliver a great performance, with many of her lines sounding flat. I also think Powell has performed better and more convincingly in other movies. However, while Sweeney and Powell weren’t the best, I loved the side characters, specifically Pete (played by GaTa) and Roger (played by Brian Brown). Their roles were funny and light-hearted, which made the enemies to lovers trope more enjoyable to watch.
Taking everything into account, the movie was overall fun. Using Natasha Beddingfield’s song ‘Unwritten’ as Ben’s emotional support song was a particularly fun bit. The scenes showing Ben’s anxiety also made his character a bit more relatable. Overall, most of the cast made the movie worthwhile. The fact that I got to follow along as two couples grew, instead of just one, was also quite exciting. Some things could have definitely been better, but if you want a lighthearted, entertaining romantic comedy, go to the cinema and check it out.
