Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner never generate enough spark to make this high-concept rom-com rise to the occasion.
By Dana Braga/Boston Movie News
“One Night Only” takes the concept of “The Purge,” except instead of murder, everyone’s trying to get laid.
Sounds like it should be a bawdy good time, right?
Hard no.
It’s a flaccid sex comedy for prudes, squandering a naughty premise on another lame rom-com. What a tease.
Director Will Gluck, working from Travis Braun’s first feature screenplay after a stint writing Disney cartoons, imagines a world where the government has essentially cockblocked an entire generation by outlawing premarital sex. Three years earlier, “The Mandate” made out-of-wedlock nookie illegal except for a single 12-hour window each August when premarital sex is legal. The opening title card sums up life under the law: “It’s been…a lot.”
It’s a clever setup—part satire, part social commentary—that practically begs to go off the rails.
No such luck. It’s a movie about sex that is afraid of sex.
Gluck opens with King Princess’ cover of “Love Is in the Air” as the camera prowls around an alternate-reality New York, where propaganda posters displaying penises and sexual positions hang on subway walls, condoms cost $200, and biosensor tattoos on people’s wrists keep track of sexual activity. When everyone’s phones light up announcing it’s officially go time, the city erupts into a big block party-slash-orgy.
For about 10 minutes, the movie is exactly as it should be.
Then it settles into convention.
Callum Turner, aka Mr. Dua Lipa, plays Owen, a straight-laced pizza shop owner who’s dumped over dinner when his girlfriend (Maya Hawke) confesses she’ll be spending the annual free-for-all screwing someone else and urges him to go “explore” too. Monica Barbaro is Allie, an aspiring singer stuck recording jingles of pop songs (Sara Bareilles’ “Brave”) rewritten to hawk prescription drugs. Both are hopeless romantics searching for genuine connection on the least romantic night of the year.
Their meet-cute is nothing special. They literally bump into each other on the street. Sparks fly … until they don’t. The plot unfolds in real time from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., and over that period the script repeatedly separates the pair through a series of misadventures with a charming con man (Andrew Burnap), a singer (Charlie Gillespie), a bartender (Julia Fox) and even Bobby Cannavale and Pete Davidson. Yet, somehow in a city as big as New York, these two lovebirds (re)meet-cute in the most random places.
For a movie built around sex, “One Night Only” is weirdly prudish. Every time the movie threatens to get a little frisky, Gluck pulls out and retreats to the safety of the genre’s formula. Earlier that day I’d watched a screener of Gregg Araki’s deliriously kinky “I Want Your Sex.” By comparison, this movie feels positively chaste coming on the (stiletto) heels of that one and the unexpected chemistry between Cooper Hoffman and Olivia Wilde. (Seriously. Go see that movie instead.)
Unfortunately, Barbaro and Turner don’t bring the same kind of heat, or any pulse at all. He has the personality of drywall and vibes more with the pizza dough he sensually rolls, stretches and spreads than he ever does with Barbaro. She’s left stranded, all gussied up in a sexy dress that practically outacts her. It’s a shimmering silver sequined halter mini with a plunging neckline that distractingly sent my mind into overdrive wondering how she avoids total nip slips. Adhesive bra or boob tape?
Gluck has cast movie-star matches before. He did it with Emma Stone in “Easy A.” He did it again with Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell in the surprise hit “Anyone But You.” There’s even a visual gag in here involving Sweeney and Powell that’s more amusing than most of what follows. My sophomoric sense of humor also giggled at the geezer shouting to the cops that he won’t wear a “love glove.”
Molly Ringwald is the only person in this supposedly sex-crazed universe getting any action. Score one for the Gen-X icon.
There are hints of sharper ideas buried underneath all this. The government blames premarital sex for all the problems, while Owen and Allie spend the night talking about dating apps, loneliness, and the kind of intimacy that’s become harder to find. The film wants to argue that real connection matters more than anonymous hookups.
Fair enough.
Eventually the gimmick grows repetitive, the ticking clock loses all urgency, and you stop caring whether Owen and Allie ever make it into bed together. By the final act, I wasn’t rooting for Owen to get the girl anymore. I just wanted some pizza.
‘One Night Only’
Rating: R for sexual material, language and brief nudity.
Cast: Callum Turner, Monica Barbaro, Maya Hawke
Director: Will Gluck
Writer: Travis Braun
Running time: 1 hour, 42 minutes
Where to watch: In theaters
Grade: C
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