NEW YORK (OSV News) – The old saw that the line between love and hate is a thin one provides the premise for the fitfully funny but morally wayward romantic comedy “Anyone But You” (Sony). Although the script, penned by director Will Gluck and Ilana Wolpert, draws on Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” the mores on display are all-too-modern.
After a chance meeting, aspiring lawyer Bea (Sydney Sweeney) and financial analyst Ben (Glen Powell) share what initially seems like a promising first date, eventually falling asleep in an embrace on his couch. But when she flees in the morning, then has second thoughts and returns to his doorstep, it’s only to overhear Ben badmouthing her to his buddy Pete (GaTa).
Six months later, the two are forced back into each other’s company when they travel from their hometown of Boston to Australia to attend a same-sex wedding. Both, however, have reasons for disguising their mutual antipathy and for pretending that they are once again romantically linked. Will pretense blossom into reality amid all the bickering?
Some of the slapstick and human foibles-based humor that accompanies the friction between the central duo works. But the screenplay’s hard sell on gay unions as well as its glamorization of heading to bed before making it to the altar set Gluck’s movie at odds with Christian values.
The film contains a benign view of homosexual acts, a semi-graphic premarital sexual encounter, upper female, rear and partial genital nudity, same-sex kissing, drug use, a few profanities, about a half-dozen milder oaths and pervasive rough as well as much crude language. The OSV News classification is O – morally offensive. The Motion Picture Association rating is R — restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.
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