One Night Only (dir. Will Gluck)

By: Adam Freed

American history proves, not as an exception, but as a hard rule the fact that prohibition doesn’t work.  While millions of citizens once sat in jail cells over their recreational use of marijuana, today it has been federally reclassified.  The term “Prohibition” has come to represent the specific period of time in which the government deemed alcohol illegal.  And, it was as a rebuke of England’s prohibition of religious freedoms hundreds of years ago that The United States of America even came to be.  So it is with this history and spirit of rebelliousness that makes the premise of the Will Gluck (Anyone But You, Easy A) romantic comedy One Night Only one of the most ridiculous films of the year. In what is presumably, an unintentional nod to the horror franchise The Purge (2013), in which murder becomes legal for one night per year, One Night Only presents a contemporary America in which unmarried couples may engage in premarital sex only on one governmentally specified day annually. But if history has taught anything, it is that when unjust prohibition takes hold, the masses will engage in the behavior of rebellion.  And yet, under the auspices of Gluck’s romantic comedy, New Yorkers unanimously and happily follow the unjust governmental policy.  The result is an occasionally entertaining vehicle for two very likable performers in Monica Barbaro (A Complete Unknown, Top Gun: Maverick) and Callum Turner (The Boys in the Boat, Emma) doing the best they can with a script that is unthinkably asinine.

Turner plays Owen, a Manhattan pizzeria owner with a wounded heart after his girlfriend, played briefly by Maya Hawke (Stranger Things), decides to use her one night of sexual freedom to engage in a new carnal conquest. Barbaro embodies Allie, a gifted singer whose career ceiling has landed her as the voice of satirical cover songs being used in commercials for feminine hygiene and skin care products.  This gag works as one of the film’s few genuine comedic moments, but is also burnt down by its overuse.  The two heartsick New Yorkers share an uninspired meet-cute followed by a predictably formulaic cat and mouse game of will they won’t they, all while the nature of their chemistry makes their union feel inevitable. One Night Only sidebars a half hearted net over the politics surrounding control over one’s body without ever fully committing to the film speaking to a larger purpose. Even for a genre that specializes in predictability, there is almost nothing about One Night Only that doesn’t feel incredibly foregone.  Even Gluck’s use of New York in summer, easily one of the most liberating and cinematically aesthetic environments imaginable, comes across as rote.  The illogically horny collection of other potential suitors that Allie and Owen encounter on their path towards intersection present as fruitless as they are absurd.  The success of Will Gluck’s prior crucially and commercially viable Easy A (2010) and Anyone But You (2023) makes the disappointment of his latest foray only feel that much more disheartening.

Target Score 3.5/10 - One Night Only is relegated into eye-roll status on the basis of a ridiculous premise on which the balance of its events rely.  Minus serviceable performances by the alluring pairing of Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner, Will Gluck’s romcom has very little to offer.