103 min | R | December 22, 2023 | Columbia Pictures
Bea and Ben have one perfect night, then spend months hating each other. A destination wedding in Sydney throws them back together, so they fake a romance to shut everyone up. The leads are gorgeous and the movie around them is a screensaver.
Bea and Ben share one perfect night after meeting in a coffee shop. A misunderstanding kills it by the next morning. Months later they collide at a destination wedding in Sydney, where Bea’s sister Halle is marrying Claudia. Ben turns up as the best friend of Pete, the bride’s brother, so escape is impossible. The wedding party keeps shoving the two exes together, and they agree to fake a romance to make everyone back off. Will Gluck builds a glossy comedy on one bet, that two beautiful people pretending to despise each other will be enough.
Sydney Sweeney plays Bea as a woman who runs from commitment and calls it ambition. She lands the physical comedy, including a slapstick beach humiliation she plays without vanity. Glen Powell gives Ben the cocky surface of a man who never gets rejected and the wounded center of one who already has. The two generate real heat in the quiet scenes and lose it whenever the plot forces them to scheme. Alexandra Shipp gives Claudia more spine than the bride role asks for, and Hadley Robinson plays Halle, Bea’s sister and the other bride, as the only guest paying attention. Dermot Mulroney and Rachel Griffiths play Bea’s parents Leo and Innie as meddlers who treat their daughter’s love life as a group project.
Gluck and co-writer Ilana Wolpert hang the story on Much Ado About Nothing and flash the borrowed lines on screen in case anyone misses the reference. The conceit promises wit and delivers contrivance. Gluck shoots Sydney like a tourism board commission, with the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge framed in nearly every exterior. The camera trusts the scenery more than it trusts the actors. The film leans on Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten” as a recurring gag, and the joke wears thin long before the closing dance. The editing favors montage over scenes, which keeps the energy up and the characters shallow.
The pleasures here are real and thin. Sweeney and Powell are magnetic, and the film knows it, so it hands them material that gives them nothing to play. Every obstacle is a misunderstanding that one honest sentence would erase. The Shakespeare scaffolding adds quotation, not depth. This is a postcard with two movie stars stapled to the front. It looks gorgeous and remembers nothing.