One Night Only: Equal Parts Silly and Stupid Is (Just) Enough

By Chris Knight

Rating: B

This is not my forever rom com, but I had fun with it on the single evening we spent together. I didn’t give it my digits, or whatever the kids say these days.

One Night Only opens with a bizarre hypothesis: What if a puritanical American government wanted to go full Handmaid’s Tale but didn’t think it would fly in the swing states, so it just decreed that sex outside marriage was illegal, save for one night?

I know, you have questions. How is it enforced? What exactly constitutes coitus? And the age-old American quandary: If you have sex in Canada, does it count in real life?

Writer Travis Braun, whose previous work was mostly on TV shows about talking cartoon dogs, isn’t telling. However, he does make a point that condoms are required, which sets off some wonky scenes as characters scramble to find this suddenly hot commodity.

There is widespread dissatisfaction among the masses, some of whom have been duped into blaming Barack Obama. But for the most part people just follow the rules.

So did I. Eventually. I’ll admit I spent a good 40 minutes puzzling over why there weren’t more gay people, and why so many New Yorkers were running around the streets kissing and not shacked up in the dark doing the dirty.

But at some point, the film’s combination of Jackass physical humour, Weird Al levels of song parodies, and the winsome personalities of Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro won me over. Or just wore me down; hard to say which.

Turner plays Owen, a good guy whose romantic nature has him planning to make love (yes, I’m using that term!) to his girlfriend and then proposing marriage. Alas, before he can pop any questions she tells him she’d rather play the field that night and invites him to do the same. Heartbroken, he heads off to find someone to bonk.

And he runs into Allie (Barbaro). Repeatedly. Single and disillusioned, she has reluctantly hit the town in a slinky micro-dress supplied by her gay roommate. (Can you tell it’s New York?)

She’s looking for a good guy with a romantic nature (nudge nudge) only to keep meeting weird, unappealing men, including a card-trick magician and Succession star Nicholas Braun as the dude whose company invented the tech that tracks sex. (He’s also working on a way to avoid being caught.)

And Owen, with whom she keeps having bad timing or getting off on the wrong foot. Geez, just call them Harry and Sally and be done with it!

Director Will Gluck has had success making beautiful people come together, most recently Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell in the similarly named Anyone but You, but also Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake in 2011’s Friends with Benefits and, if you squint, Donhnall Gleeson and Rose Byrne in Peter Rabbit.

Will-they-won’t-they is a hackneyed way to string an audience along, but it worked 100 years ago in It Happened One Night, and it’s still got some life in it, with the right people (watch for a couple of surprising cameos from the Star Trek universe) and a few good tunes.

One Night Only is equal parts stupid and silly, but 50-50 turns out to be enough to keep an audience hooked. Besides, if this romantic comedy does well, I look forward to its crossover with The Purge, when sex and murder become legal on the same evening. Bring protection in both cases.

One Night Only. Directed by Will Gluck. Starring Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro. In theatres August 7.