The romantic comedy genre has remained largely the same since its birth. They always seem to follow the same tropes that have grown to become staples of the medium, leading many of them to feel ‘samey’ and drown in an endless ocean of cliché if they’re unable to capture audiences enough, especially nowadays. Will Gluck now attempts to break the mould with his outlandish One Night Only, set in a fictional New York, in which premarital sex has been outlawed, leaving me to wonder how far rom-coms will go until they’re finally stripped back, returning to previous ’90s levels.
One Night Only ends up as good enough. This is a funny comedy at times and has a few simple, okay moments of romance, though is that really enough these days? There are so many movies released, especially romantic ones, so when one as cliché and ‘good enough’ as One Night Only comes out, it isn’t really good enough anymore, ironically.
What really ruined this for me was that I, very early on, came to realise that this shares a strange amount of similarities with Will Gluck’s other famous feature, Anyone But You. A conventionally attractive man and woman constantly run into each other, pretending to hate one another while continually denying their undeniable attraction and chemistry with the other person, until they finally accept what they’re feeling and give in to their desires. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, Anyone But You is quite a fun movie, as is One Night Only, though you know exactly what’s happening minutes before it actually unfolds. One Night Only will inevitably end up being lost in the romcom ocean in a few weeks, just like Anyone But You before it, despite its endless attempts to feel original.
One thing about this that felt severely missed, and if done right could have actually made it feel as original as it tries to be, is the world building. Anything we’re told about how this mandate has changed the American landscape and relationship with their government — or how this world differs from our own in any way — happens entirely in the background, with its many advertisements, for which there are so many to the point where every moment feels like a walking ad. We never see anything that’s actually different, so why does this mandate exist? Why does this exemption night exist? They never even go to the slight effort to name this as more than ‘the one night’, making me wonder how much thought was put into this world at all.
The concept of these tags on everybody’s arm is quite an interesting addition to create a more dystopian police state of a world, in which everybody can be surveilled with a tattoo. I understand why they wouldn’t want to move in this direction with such a lighthearted, inoffensive rom-com as this, though what added to the movie that we did have is the idea of being able to choose what this tag looks like. While we were able to see why Allie chose a lighthouse — connecting to her childhood — even if it didn’t inform her character in any meaningful way, the choice for Owen to have a bat on his arm felt lazy to me. He simply chose this because of his impulsiveness, which we learnt about throughout the movie already. This was an opportunity for some sort of inner look into who these people are, something that we wouldn’t have been able to see otherwise, but was completely wasted on a story about Allie’s childhood and an impulse.
The whole message of this movie centres around finding love in a world full of lust. How do you find a real connection — your ‘prince’ — on the one night that is tailor made for sex? However, this makes absolutely no attempt to show us this endless lust, aside from in the background — once again. If the two main points of this movie — its world differing from our own and the lust of this one night — are completely secondary in the story, so what’s the movie’s primary focus? I couldn’t tell you, aside from simply showing Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro running around the New York streets, which gets stale much quicker than I’m sure they hoped.
The first hour of this ends up being such a slog to get through, simply because it consisted of nothingness. We follow Owen and Allie crossing paths every so often as they walk around New York, finding many eccentric characters on their way. These encounters were funny for the first ten, maybe even twenty minutes. However, it just keeps going for a large majority of the movie and gets boring very early on.
In a movie like this, and any rom-com really, you rely entirely on the two main actors working well together. Any actual plot or uniqueness can be secondary if these actors can convince you they’d be perfect together. While, in the more comedic moments, Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro are able to look good together, they make the more romantic moments — the slow, undeniable looks at each other, the hidden flirting, anything that requires any kind of sexual tension — quite awkward, despite the movie’s attempts to convince you they wouldn’t have more chemistry as siblings than lovers. Because they mostly fail at this — not to mention their pitiful individual acting, making me worry for one of the Bond frontrunners — you’re forced to look at all the imperfections. While some can work as Will Gluck staples and charm you, many of them just take you out of this experience and this world.
Even though One Night Only can often be quite a fun, charming story of finding love in the most unlikely scenario, it spends so much of its energy trying to make itself stand out from the crowd, while somehow ending up more cliche than you could ever imagine. I know Will Gluck is able to make a fun rom-com — even if they all end up as the same enemies to lovers story — but One Night Only makes no attempt to stand out while making too much of an attempt to stand out, ironically. It relies so heavily on classic romcom tropes, even if it tries to tell you that it’s unique. I’m sure Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner could head up a silly romcom, possibly separately, though that isn’t One Night Only.