Everything But You with Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney, A Little Ado About Nothing (review)
The romcom with the very hot Glen from Top Gun and Sydney from Euphoria is too lazy to convince.
If the heroes of Everything except you bear the first names (Beatrice and Ben) of the two main characters of A lot of noise for nothingthis is obviously not a coincidence: always, at least since its Easy Girl, Will Gluck seeks to revive American regressive comedy (post-Farrelly brothers, post-American Pie) in the ink of Shakespearean comedy. Everything except you is thus adorned with small chic and sophisticated touches, like these sentences (taken from A lot of noise for nothing, you guessed it) which comment on the action, drawn in the setting, on a board or on a window. And here is a sentence from Romeo and Juliet, tagged on bricks at the end of the prologue: “Here we have a lot to do with hatred, but even more with love”.
Very good, but Everything except you is miles away from this pretty little program, and light years away from the lightness ofEasy Girl or the cartoon rhythm of Peter Rabbit : a romcom of today, so cautious and anesthetized that it doesn’t provoke much. So here are Bea and Ben, a self-doubting law student and an ultra-sexy banker, who hate each other because of their failed meeting, and pretend to be a couple so they can be left alone during a wedding weekend in Australia. This marriage – among the rich and powerful white people who can invite family and friends on the other side of the world – Gluck frames it above all, like any other yes man studio, using large aerial shots to showcase the city of Sydney and its surrounding beaches. It doesn’t seem like much, but it eats up a lot of footage, the really funny outbursts of which are still too rare to do our thing. It drags, it drags. We’re being a little harsh, because there are a few funny ideas that come across (an Australian cello surfer, that kind of thing), but too quickly and superficially for it to save the whole thing.
Everything But You star Glen Powell defends romantic comedies
We won’t say that it’s the times that want that, but the context, most certainly: the romcom of the 2020s must be shot like an interstitial YouTube ad for spending your vacation in Abu Dhabi – the one we zaps to access the desired video, or which interrupts the one you were watching. But there is no difference in Everything except you between this ad and the rest of the film, reduced to a few moments of comic tension built on its ultra-minor pitch and its predictable situations. If a wedding cake appears in the frame, it will fall in the next scene; if the heroes’ exes cross paths, they will end up making out; if heroes hate each other, they will inevitably fall in love. Shakespeare also had a line about this (in Twelfth Night): “I smell a device”sniffing out the farce, the mechanism too well regulated not to be anything other than an artifice as hollow as the circumstances which led Bea and Ben into their game of attraction and repulsion.
Everything except you does it at least have the merit of fulfilling its main promise – on the strength of a sexy trailer – namely to bring together in the same frame two ultra sexy bodies of contemporary American cinema, Sydney Sweeney (Euphoria) And Glen Powell (Top Gun: Maverick) ? Even if these bodies curiously provoke less excitement than one might think, as the context is sanitized: Powell was much more erotic in his fighter pilot uniform from Top Gun (THE context, therefore) than in the white shirt of this swelling cryptobro. Given the American success of the film, are we not completely wrong? Is Everything But You instead a snapshot of history? Will we see again Everything except you in twenty years, saying to yourself: “how beautiful they were, all the same” ? There is the question.
