Digital Review – Hooking Up (2020)

It’s not a great title.  One so generic it could have been chosen by committee. And it doesn’t bode well for writer/director Nico Raineau’s feature debut – especially when you watch the film and realise it’s littered with much better ideas.

At the outset, Hooking Up is a sex comedy.  With lots of sex.  Journalist Darla (Pitch Perfect’s Brittany Snow) is a self-confessed sex addict, although it provides the material she needs for her magazine features.  After she’s caught in embarrassing circumstances by Bailey (Veep’s Sam Richardson), who just happens to be in the same building for a cancer therapy session, she hits on the idea of writing a feature about him, something she hopes will help put her back in favour with her editor.  The plan develops even further, and the two set off on a road trip, re-visiting the locations of all her previous sexual encounters and re-enacting them together.  Literally.

In itself, a promising idea for an adult comedy and, when you see some of the headlines Darla comes up with for her daily blog about the trip – Sex Drive, Route 69 etc – you wonder why one earth one of them wasn’t turned into the title.  We digress. Linked in to the road trip idea are other sub-plots: Bailey has been treated for testicular cancer and it’s returned, he’s struggling after a break-up with his childhood sweetheart, Darla worries that she might end up alone like her mother and the list goes on.  Plus, there’s the inevitable will-they-won’t-they scenario.

It’s a film of two halves.  The first is clearly going for out-and-out comedy, even if the script has a habit of hitting wide of the target.  Nonetheless, the road trip idea is entertaining enough and the two leads keep things moving along happily, especially the engaging Richardson, who is far easier to warm to than Snow’s character. But, after the first handful of encounters, the journey veers off onto a silly side road that comes close to being a dead end.  They have to visit Bailey’s parents and pose as a couple, then he tries to resurrect his previous relationship with Liz (Anna Akana) but the whole unresolved question of his relationship with Darla is always lingering in the background.

The themes with real potential – coping with cancer, empty nesting among them – are left under-developed and you can’t escape the impression that this is a film that simply doesn’t know what it wants to be. So it clumsily bolts an attempt at a soft-hearted drama onto the comedy of the first half, and it simply doesn’t work.  Bubbling under the surface there’s a potentially thoughtful and engaging film here, be it a comedy or a drama, but as it stands it’s neither.  Perhaps that title isn’t so wide after the mark after all.

★★ 1/2

Drama | Cert: 15 | Universal | Digital, 8 June 2020 | Dir. Nico Raineau | Brittany Snow, Sam Richardson, Anna Akana, Jordana Brewster