Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Anyone but You’ on VOD, an Amusingly Randy R-rated Rom-Com Starring a Sizzling Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell

The bland-as-a-cracker rom-com landscape has been very incredibly eye-candied thanks to Anyone but You (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video), which puts Sydney Sweeney (Euphoria, Reality) and Glen Powell (Top Gun: Maverick, Everybody Wants Some!!) in several states of undress as they kindle their chemistry. That may explain why the film was a sneaky theatrical hit, earning $189 million worldwide, its audiences actually growing from week to week, presumably because word got out that we get to see how some hot young stars have been ’scaping various parts of their bodies. So yes, Anyone but You is horny, but it’s also funny, silly, sweet and stupid enough to be more than just an excuse to ogle the beef ‘n’ cheese.

ANYONE BUT YOU: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The setting: a cafe. Bea (Sweeney) has to PEE. Like, really bad. But as by-the-book baristas in movies always are, she won’t let Bea use the can without buying something first, and the line makes the Great Wall of China look like the anthills on your sidewalk. Thankfully, Ben (Powell) is next in line, witnesses the exchange and acquires the bathroom key for our full-bladdered protagonist. This is the Meet Cute, of course. The movie gets right to it. No wasting time. Gotta appreciate that. Bea and Ben start bantering, and you’re no doubt thinking, has she forgotten the feeling of intense pressure down there? But then you’re realizing, aha, she’s experiencing a different pressing feeling down there. Who can blame her? This guy is a sexy hunk of sex. 

And so Bea and Ben – Bea and Ben, Ben and Bea, Bea and Ben, it just rings with alliterative charm, doesn’t it? – end up back at his place not doing it yet. It’s too soon! Gotta build some of that sexy tension, you know. He makes grilled cheese sandwiches and they stay up for hours talking, and end up snuggling, still dressed, above the covers. He’s a finance bro who probably doesn’t even use one of the four ovens in his kitchen. She’s a law student who isn’t so sure if she wants to be a lawyer. They’re just oozing explosive lava charm together, Bea and Ben, Ben and Bea. But. Bea wakes up and sneaks out, and when she realizes she shouldn’t have done that, turns around and heads back and overhears Ben, honked off that she split without saying goodbye, tells his bestie Pete (GaTa) that she’s a mess and was just another notch on the ol’ bedpost. 

Pissed, Bea walks away and the movie ends and nobody ends up in Australia in various states of undress at all. No! I’m lying! As luck, fate and/or the screenwriter’s omnipotent hand would have it, Bea’s sister Halle (Hadley Robinson) ends up engaged to Pete’s sister Claudia (Alexandra Shipp), and a year or two or whatever after their magically cute night together, Bea and Ben find themselves on the same plane to koala country for for one of those no-expense-spared destination weddings. I mean, it’s on a damn isthmus jutting into the ocean. Shit’s expensive, bro. And it’s totally miserable, especially if you’re Bea and you’re stuck next to Ben or if you’re Ben and you’re stuck next to Bea, and you all hate each other. They spit-fire word-daggers at each other, like “You’ll always be my rock bottom,” stuff like that. There’s no way they will ever get over their mutual disgust and smush genitals. No way. Might as well turn the movie off right now.

But in case you don’t, let it be known that there are other characters in the movie complicating everything: There’s Bea’s parents (Dermot Mulroney and Rachel Griffiths), who are pushy and overbearing and don’t yet know that she dropped out of law school, and they invite her ex-fiancee Jonathan (Darren Barnet) along, hoping they’ll get back together. There’s also Claudia’s mother and stepfather (Michelle Hurd and Bryan Brown), and Ben’s ex Margaret (Charlee Fraser), who broke his heart, and is now dating Beau (Joe Davidson), a Thor-like slab o’ not enough brain cells. Some of these characters worry that Bea and Ben’s bickering will ruin the wedding weekend, so they conspire to make them fall in love; meanwhile, Jonathan and Margaret’s nearbyness complicate Bea and Ben’s feelings. Sigh – this is really starting to feel like 5-D CHESS, I tell you. Hijinks ensue, of course, and since there’s a thin line between the one thing and the other thing, inevitably someone will trip over that line, and probably show their ass while doing it, literally.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Between the surprisingly charming and funny Anyone but You and the similarly surprisingly charming and funny No Hard Feelings, one can’t help but hope we’re in the middle of a rom-comaissance. (We might need a third R-rated sex comedy released by Sony before we can officially declare it, though.)

Performance Worth Watching: Powell and Sweeney each carry a beaker full of liquid and when they pipet droplets into the same canister, the resulting concoction fizzes nicely, like a seventh-grade science experiment.

Memorable Dialogue: Even the script knows these people are acting like junior-high dopes:

Ben: Making her jealous isn’t gonna work. We’re not in seventh grade.

Bea: Trust me, bro. We’re all in seventh grade when it comes to this stuff.

Sex and Skin: Some butts, some boobs, some pubes, a fairly steamy sex scene and one incidence of close-up comedy peen.

Our Take: Hint: It’s best if you consider Anyone but You a full-on Daffy-Duck-wearing-polka-dots-and-a-flower-face screwball romp, because the less seriously you take it, the more you’ll enjoy it. Directed by Will Gluck (Easy A), who co-wrote with Ilana Wolpert, the film is allegedly inspired by Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. As much as I’d like to brush that off with a yeah-whatever eyeroll, that fact encourages us to consider the movie folly for folly’s sake, a loose and silly lark that embraces rom-com cliches while poking a bit of gently satirical fun at them. Coincidences and contrivances abound in this dumbass plot, but it at least seems as if the filmmakers are aware that they’re fiddling with formula – and making sure the characters are aware too, albeit in a manner that’s more infectiously silly than gratingly self-referential.

Understanding the tonal needle Gluck threads here is key to our acceptance of numerous ridiculous scenes, e.g., the one where Ben rips all his clothes off after Bea puts her hand in his shorts and pulls out a spider the size of an IHOP flapjack. The movie inevitably delivers predictable slapstick hijinks involving rescue helicopters and dropped wedding cakes, all set against picturesque backdrops – Aussie nature walks, dinner cruises on the harbor, etc. – that look especially amazing with a bare, nicely bronzed set of glutes in the foreground. Gluck shows commitment to the type of slick visuals we haven’t really seen in rom-coms for the last decade-and-a-half or so, and he not only inspires snappy comic timing from his cast, but generates some as well with clever angles and slam-bang edits.

None of this would work if Powell and Sweeney didn’t show a little bit of that je ne sais quoi, and by that I don’t mean abs and cleaves, but actually maybe I do mean it, because they look pretty great up there on the screen, dripping with pheromones in evening wear and bathing suits (or less), generally representing the human species’ ideal physical form, and stoking our desire to see them break and enter each other like thieves. They also exchange high-octane burns convincingly enough to make the inevitable earnest breakthrough feel legit, or at least legit enough for a high-gloss rom-com that’s about absolutely nothing except the most superficial qualities of crazy stupid human love. That we even give two-thirds of a shit whether or not they get together in the end is a testament to this movie’s ability to erode our cynicism towards the familiarities of the genre. Which is to say, if you don’t like Anyone but You, a little too much of your curmudge may be showing.  

Our Call: Powell and Sweeney work hard to sell Anyone but You’s sexy-sweet-funny formula – and I’m buying. STREAM IT.  

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.