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HOOKING UP
Director: Nico Raineau Cast: Brittany Snow, Sam Richardson, Anna Akana, Amy Pietz, Jordana Brewster, Vivica A. Fox, Shaun J. Brown, Alexis G. Zall MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:44 Release Date: 3/20/20 (digital and on-demand) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 19, 2020 Director
Nico Raineau and Lauren Schacher's screenplay for Hooking Up does some admirable things during its epilogue. The same
cannot be said of the rest of the movie. Here,
we get two generic premises mashed together: a road-trip story and a romantic
comedy about two mismatched people who eventually learn they have feelings for
each other. The inevitable couple is made up of Darla (Brittany Snow), a sex
addict who's trying to save her job writing a sex column for a magazine, and
Bailey (Sam Richardson), who discovers his testicular cancer has returned while
he's pining over the break-up with his high-school sweetheart Elizabeth (Anna
Akana). The
convoluted setup has Darla convincing Bailey to take a cross-country trip with
her to all of the places where she has had sex, and she'll have a
"do-over"—having sex only with Bailey at these spots. She insists
it's for recovery, but Darla actually wants to use the experience—and Bailey's
cancer—as a story. Bailey agrees, but he really just wants a ride to Dallas,
where he can continue stalking his ex by crashing her mother's retirement party. None of
this really makes much sense, but if the payoff to these weird and exploitative
motives were funny, it wouldn't matter. Snow and Richardson are, under the
circumstances, as charming as possible, playing their roles with, respectively,
a tough-but-wounded brashness and an amiable degree of awkwardness. These
characters, though, are more off-putting in attitude and action than Raineau and
Schacher seem to realize. The
central gag, as Darla and Bailey have sex in assorted places, is so hollow that
the screenplay gives up on pretty quickly. Then, though, we're stuck with an
attempt to put the characters' behaviors in mopey, self-pitying light. Darla
actually realizes that she has hurt people with her addiction, and Bailey comes
to understand that he likes the idea of his former relationship more than the
relationship itself. This tonal shift is jarring—because it comes out of
nowhere and—and unearned—mostly because the movie spends its first act
making light of the characters' problems. Hooking
Up, of course, is leading to main
characters' revelation that, as different as they may be, they might be perfect
for each other. As inescapable as that conclusion may be, at least the movie
acknowledges it's not a quick fix for either character. Copyright © 2020 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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(for
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