Anything but this.

There’s a scene in Anyone But You where Glenn Powell and Sydney Sweeney, playing two human-shaped avatars of romantic comedy tropes, are stranded together on a buoy in Sydney Harbour, soaked and shivering, forced to share body heat in that time-honoured tradition of people who have clearly never heard of towels. It’s meant to sizzle. What it actually does is showcase, in UHD 4K clarity, the absolute absence of spark between its two leads – like trying to start a fire with two wet marshmallows.

In a genre that lives and dies by chemistry, Anyone But You is aggressively unbothered by it. It’s a film that throws Sydney Sweeney’s influencer-manic energy against Glenn Powell’s smirking frat boy charm like a flint and steel, only to produce a sad little puff of narrative smoke. The result isn’t so much will-they-won’t-they as why-are-they. If charisma were currency, these two would be paying off this movie in emotional overdraft fees.

Directed by Will Gluck, whose previous entries in the rom-com genre (Easy A, Friends With Benefits) actually understood sexual tension, Anyone But You feels like the product of an AI trained on the Wikipedia entry for Much Ado About Nothing and a Buzzfeed listicle titled “Top 10 Rom-Com Tropes That Need To Be Done Again But Worse.” There’s a wedding. There’s fake dating. There’s an overuse of Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten” that starts out ironic and ends up feeling like an act of violence against the audience.

Every beat of the story feels copy-pasted from better, hotter, funnier films. At one point, Powell’s character takes off his shirt and the camera lingers like it’s trying to will sexual tension into existence. Sweeney stares at him with an expression that could be longing or indigestion. It’s hard to tell, because despite their combined physical attractiveness being scientifically measurable, their interactions are so hollow you could use them to store popcorn.

The supporting cast is a sea of miscast talent, orbiting the leads like emotionally neglected satellites. Michelle Hurd and Dermot Mulroney are present, in the same way that toast is present in a hotel breakfast buffet: there, but you wish it had been something else. The script tosses them scraps of charm and then drags us back to the main event – two people pretending to pretend to be in love, while accidentally convincing us they can barely tolerate each other off-camera.

What makes Anyone But You truly fascinating – like a taxidermy exhibit of a once-majestic genre – is its refusal to commit. It gestures at sincerity but immediately undercuts it with winking meta-humour, as if to say, “See? We know this is dumb. We’re in on the joke.” But they’re not. The film is less a rom-com and more a studio pitch deck with abs and Botox.

At one point, the film tries to lean into physical comedy, trapping our leads on a hike where a spider compels Powell to hurl all his clothes into the treetops – because nothing says romance like coerced nudity and the terror of Antipodean arachnids. But instead of tension or hilarity, it delivers the kind of awkward silence usually reserved for group therapy exercises or company retreats. It’s all very One Wedding and a Refusal to Concede Defeat by way of a low-rent Crocodile Hunter skit badly cropped into an Instagram Reel. Then again, Powell’s conspicuous vascularity (thanks, no doubt, to an intense pre-“Action!” pump up) does lend credibility to the idea he may actually have been bitten by something venomous.

It desperately wants to be a throwback, but it ends up feeling more like a flat parody created by people who vaguely remember rom-coms but mostly remember the marketing. It has all the right moves, but none of the magic – like watching someone try to moonwalk in Crocs.

Anyone But You is a fascinating case study in what happens when you cast for faces, not for fire; trending topics, not talent. It’s a rom-com with the romantic tension of a dropped Zoom call and the comic timing of a LinkedIn connection request. Click on accept if you must, but don’t be surprised if you come away feeling like you’ve just eaten an entire bag of pick’n’mix in one go, overly-sugared, slightly queasy and guiltily unfulfilled.