Let’s face it. Rom-coms are notoriously difficult to calibrate. How to have the leads meet cute. How to imbue them with a certain measure of intelligence, while having them behave in often silly ways. How to populate the story with amusing subplots and supporting characters. How to have the protagonists finally–finally–get together as a couple. Honestly, it can become an exhausting exercise for an audience. One Night Only tries hard, and it has one exceptional performance, but its potential largely goes untapped.
Producer-director Will Gluck has gone down this relationship road before, trying to put a fresh spin on the genre. Easy A (2010), an excellent vehicle for Emma Stone, crackles with irony in an age of social media. Friends with Benefits (2011) relies too heavily on bland humor and predictable situations. The Shakespeare-inspired Anyone But You (2023) captures two young stars (Glen Powell and Spokane’s Sydney Sweeney) on the rise. Now, after directing two family-friendly Peter Rabbit movies featuring James Corden, Gluck gives romantic comedy another try, with New York City as the setting.
Gluck and Daytime Emmy-nominated writer Travis Braun have an intriguing, if undeveloped, premise: by federal government decree, unmarried people may engage in sex only one night a year. Cue the comparisons with the Purge franchise, with its dystopian one-day-a-year-of-mayhem theme. Let’s stop there.
This has the potential for melding the sexual with the political. We learn that the “Chastity Mandate” has been in force for the past three years. A company called Rexton Labs enforces it by bestowing wrist tattoos (biosensors) that change colors when the annual twelve-hour “Exemption Period” begins. (Of course, Green means Go For It.) This invites all kinds of questions about privacy, birth rates and personal rights, but they only merit fleeting references in the film, in order to leave more time for the requisite absurdity.
Let’s continue, then, with the one standout performance. It comes from Monica Barbaro (A Complete Unknown, Top Gun: Maverick). She plays Allie, a lovelorn singer who records commercial jingles, yet has a phobia about performing in front of live audiences. She registers as a believable character expressing frustration and loneliness alongside warmth, charm and resourcefulness. She, acting on her own, largely holds the story together.
Callum Turner (The Boys in the Boat, Fantastic Beasts) portrays her inevitable match, Owen, the proprietor of a pizza shop whose girlfriend, Malika, abandons him for a one-night stand with a neighbor in their building. Even after their first encounter–a literal, visceral encounter on the street–they continue pursuing “parallel tracks” in the hours to come. She lives with a friend, Jacinta (King Princess), who meets an honest-to-goodness prince that night–the stuff of fairy tales and quirky casting–and he lives with his mother, Linda, who has very specific plans for herself and her partner, Rick.
In between various chance encounters at a convenience store, a police station and Owen’s restaurant, the two leads run, stroll and stagger from one nonsensical situation to another. Allie does so much more impressively, mind you, since she spends the bulk of the time dressed in a miniskirt and spike heels. Most of the gags are tedious, and most of the humor is forced, not truly character driven. However, give Gluck credit for the clever appearances of the two leads in one of his earlier pictures.
The not untalented supporting cast here includes Maya Hawke (Malika), Molly Ringwald (Linda), LeVar Burton (Rick), Roma Maffia, Julia Fox and Charlie Gillespie, who has an amusing turn as a rock star.
For Monica Barbaro, this is another star turn in an ascending career arc on stage and screen (large and small). For Callum Turner, who certainly looks the part of the forlorn hunk, this is another rom-com dud, after last year’s Eternity, a film with an even better, under-realized concept.
As a producer, director and writer, Will Gluck has demonstrated that he can shape a scene and sustain an engaging narrative. He and Travis Braun, whose script had been perched on Hollywood’s Black List of best unproduced screenplays, aim relatively high, even invoking the Empire State Building, which figured so prominently in the glossy 1957 romantic melodrama An Affair to Remember, starring Cary Grant and Debrorah Kerr. Unfortunately, for all of its proto-ideas, occasional laughs and constant coupling here, One Night Only just can’t escape the narrow path of dated rom-com tropes.
