The year 2023 brought moviegoing back from the near-dead. But a mass art form can’t rely on a “Barbenheimer” phenomenon every year, and the list of big releases for 2024 is just a long hall of imitations and reboots: fewer Marvel movies, which is a good thing, but in their place Bad Boys 4 and Inside Out 2; Mufasa: The Lion King and Gladiator 2; and Another Bridge on the River Kwai. (You’ll never guess which one of those I made up.)

In a recent essay on the movie business’s attempts to save itself, Richard Rushfield offers a suggestion: “Do the obvious.” His example of obviousness is playing in theaters right now: Anyone but You, a romantic comedy that earned middling to poor reviews but then turned into the winter’s sleeper hit. In the past its success wouldn’t have been surprising: It’s the only romantic comedy in the season of Saint Valentine, and it stars two up-and-comers, Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney, in roles designed to groom them to be stars. But Hollywood is treating it “like some sort of freak hailstorm in the middle of summer,” Rushfield writes, because the industry can’t think outside the sequels-and-superheroes box.

I like Powell and Sweeney and I miss the rom-com, so I had been rooting for Anyone but You for a while, ever since a transparent attempt by their publicists to generate rumors of an on-set romance brought the movie to my attention. Then the bad reviews kept me away, then the slow but steady box-office numbers made me interested again, then I saw it.

And then — ugh, no, not this.

The plot, if you could call it that, is supposedly adapted from Much Ado about Nothing, with its fast-talking enemies turned lovers through the machinations of their friends. Here the enmity starts with a coffee-shop meet-cute between Ben (some sort of finance guy) and Bea (a law student who’s unhappy about it; that’s her whole personality), which turns into a romantic first date, which curdles when Bea sneaks off the next morning and returns to overhear Ben negging her to his roommate to cover up his own disappointment that she slipped away. From this mix-up comes hostility when the two are reintroduced months later because Bea’s sister (Hadley Robinson) is dating Ben’s best friend (Alexandra Shipp), a sapphic match that leads to lesbian nuptials in Australia, a beachfront weekend where, of course, Bea and Ben will turn hate back into love.

The non-Shakespearean twist is that the friends-and-family attempt to convince the feuding pair that each is sweet on the other doesn’t work, and instead Bea and Ben decide to fake a romance to make it easier for each to deal with the presence of an ex-paramour in the wedding party. This is supposed to set up a series of wacky set pieces in which their attempts to playact lust go wrong, before it sets up the eventual realization of authentic love.

What it actually sets up is the most leaden, painful excuse for a farce ever committed to the screen, backgrounded by a passel of one-note characters who all look like they’re auditioning for a documentary about vacuous rich people at destination weddings. When the movie tries to actually imitate Shakespeare (a few of the actors seem to think that’s what they’re doing, at least), it’s painful; when the script abandons Shakespeare’s plot, it’s even worse. The dialogue is crude when it should crackle, the various background relationships don’t make any sense, and the subplots — well, there are no subplots, as though the screenwriters just gave up on creating the kind of B-side drama (the best friends getting together, a business conflict, whatever) that a good romantic comedy needs to breathe.

Nobody could elevate this material and, as I said, I like Powell and Sweeney, but the movie doesn’t do either any favors. Sweeney is not a classic rom-com heroine — she’s not a klutz or a daffy charmer; she’s sultry, breathy, busty, more of a sex goddess than a winning Meg Ryan or Rachel McAdams type. She holds the screen, and you could write a good romance for her, I’m sure, but it would take some creativity with character and plot, and plugging her into a role that seems written for a completely different kind of actress (to the extent that it’s written at all) just leaves her adrift.

Powell is better at the charm-and-chatter aspect, but spending the whole movie shirtless in the sun underscores his main deficiency as a potential A-list hero: His eyes are too small for his face, and squinting on an Australian beach only makes the problem worse. The gaze is very important to male big-screen charisma, and a set of huge pecs with tiny peepers peering down from somewhere up above just isn’t the right look for a would-be matinée idol.

Let me end by saying something optimistic, though. The fact that this movie became not just a hit but a sleeper hit, built by word of mouth rather than publicity, tells you that audiences have low standards but also that they’re starved for normal, old-school Hollywood fare. If Anyone but You can succeed, imagine what you could do with a decent script. I bet that Shakespeare guy has some good ideas.