Will Gluck knows how to put an appealing couple on screen and make them look foolish without losing their charm. We are less persuaded by the writing, which too often supplies another misunderstanding when a comedy needs a joke.
Fi1m perspective
In Anyone but You (2023), Glen Powell has to remove his trousers on a beach in front of both families and plays the embarrassment as though he were closing a deal. We laughed because he keeps the man's confidence intact while taking away his dignity. Will Gluck is good at giving attractive actors something ridiculous to do, and at letting their charm survive it. What follows is twenty minutes spent advancing a plan without another laugh. We find that the more closely his romantic comedies organise their misunderstandings, the less room they leave for anyone to say something funny.
Easy A (2010), his breakthrough, gave Emma Stone a script that let her talk her way out of trouble. Its use of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter established a habit of bringing older stories into contemporary comedy, later repeated with Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing in Anyone but You. Friends with Benefits (2011) followed, before the musical Annie (2014) and the Peter Rabbit films (2018 and 2021) took him away from romantic comedy. The return to couples and their complications has retained his interest in casting people we enjoy watching together. It has not consistently given those people enough to say.
Gluck and co-writer Ilana Wolpert move Anyone but You to a wedding in Sydney, where Sydney Sweeney and Powell's characters pretend to be a couple. Sweeney and Powell make agreeable company, but scene after scene requires them to establish a pretence, maintain it or cope with it going wrong. The familiar plot would matter less if the dialogue did more than manage it. Once a comic situation is over, there is scarcely a line worth remembering. Their chemistry makes it easy to sit through, but cannot make it funny enough.
One Night Only (2026) gives Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner another appealing pairing, this time in a romance built around an annual twelve-hour exemption from a ban on premarital sex. Travis Braun's screenplay uses that premise mainly to hurry the couple through romantic mishaps, and Gluck seems reluctant to look beyond those complications. The daydream sequences are funnier because they briefly allow the sexual imagination that the rest of the film seems nervous about. Gluck's wish to keep everything cheerful feels evasive when the obstacle is so grim. Start with Easy A, where the lead is allowed to do more than keep the plot on schedule.
Biography
Will Gluck is an American film director, screenwriter and producer. He began his career writing for television series including Grosse Pointe, Luis and Andy Richter Controls the Universe, and co-created the Fox series The Loop.
Gluck made his feature directorial debut with Fired Up! (2009). He went on to direct and write Easy A (2010), Friends with Benefits (2011), Annie (2014), Peter Rabbit (2018) and its sequel Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway (2021), and Anyone but You (2023), on which he also received a producer credit.
He is a graduate of Cornell University and has worked as a songwriter and composer on some of his projects.
