Every now and then a romantic comedy comes along with an absolutely ludicrous premise that we just sort of accept because it creates the unique conditions for watching a pair of budding movie stars fall in love.
This year’s entrant is “One Night Only,” set in a pretty familiar if spit-shiny New York City. The catch is that America, for some reason, has outlawed premarital sex, with the exception of one night a year. It’s like “The Purge,” for sex, so the Sex Purge.
Travis Braun’s script was on the Black List, the list of best unproduced screenplays in Hollywood, which tends to reward hooky, high-concept projects like this, often to mixed results. That is most definitely the case with “One Night Only,” a film that exists on the vapors of a bizarre plot and the appeal of hot actors.
You probably have a lot of questions, and “One Night Only,” is only going to satisfy some of them. How does the government police the premarital sex? With biosensors of course. Singles receive small tattoos that turn from red to green during the 12 hours that premarital sex is permitted, which measure things like oxytocin and dopamine, and whether that sensor is in close proximity to another.
The why of it all is much less satisfactory. A news report explains that rates of teen pregnancy are down, which is a very 1980s justification, as all the current Christo-fascists are more concerned with a declining birth rate, and banning sex and enforcing condom usage (another “how do they do that?”) is not going to fix that problem. The whole gambit feels dated and under-explored, both conceptually and politically — so you’re saying single straight people are an oppressed sexual minority? Maybe that one should have been unpacked a little bit more.
On the night of the Sex Purge, the New York streets are flooded with attractive, thin, largely heterosexual couples making out all over the place. Perish the thought of being single and vulnerable, as they say on “Love Island,” on such a night, which is how we find our two winsome protagonists, Owen (Callum Turner) and Allie (Monica Barbaro). He’s a pizza man whose girlfriend (Maya Hawke) wants to explore someone else; advertising jingle singer Allie has been ditched by her best friend (King Princess) for a prince.
These two strangers are despondent and desperate. When they bump into each other on the street, a meet-cute turns into a meet-puke, and so the story follows an enemies-to-friends-to-lovers track, as they spend one crazy night continually running into each other on their increasingly urgent sex quest.
Turner and Barbaro have plenty of charm, and director Will Gluck does a fair amount of key jangling to distract from the nagging issues of the premise itself. There are repeated gags about Allie’s job singing covers of popular songs reworked for pharmaceutical companies, and almost too many celebrity cameos. Every time a celeb’s face pops up it’s essentially a “ooh, shiny thing!” moment so that we stop thinking about the intricacies of the world where Sex Purge happens, or even some of the wonky character moments.
Allie’s most impressive feat is making it 12 hours on New York streets in spike heels and a sequined micro-mini, but rom-coms are the stuff of fantasy anyway.
Yet “One Night Only” doesn’t present us with fun escapism, but rather a misguided, underbaked and very straight guy fantasy version of what something like this might look like, which is essentially … lots of people kissing in public? It’s so tame, yet also weirdly conservative.
Turner and Barbaro give it their best, but “One Night Only” needed to go back to the drawing board.
One Night Only
Two stars out of four