There are bad movies, there are boring movies, and then there are movies like One Night Only—films that seem almost determined to test the patience of anyone stuck in a theater seat for the duration.
The title promises urgency, intimacy and perhaps a little danger. What it delivers is a painfully manufactured exercise in cinematic déjà vu, in which virtually every scene feels like a setup for something interesting that never actually arrives. The movie keeps reaching for tension, emotion and suspense, only to come up empty-handed.
The biggest problem is the script, which mistakes exposition for storytelling and obviousness for insight. There is little, if any, wit or cleverness in a topic made for that. Instead of allowing the audience to discover the story, the filmmakers repeatedly explain it.
Even worse, One Night Only has the curious distinction of making a single night feel interminable. Whatever clock is ticking in the story seems to have stopped in the theater. Scenes drag, conversations circle the same points and the pacing becomes increasingly exhausting. By the time the movie finally gets where it is going, the audience may have forgotten why it cared in the first place.
There are flashes of potential buried underneath the wreckage. The premise could have supported a funny romp or an emotionally charged character piece. But the movie never commits to either. It wants to be suspenseful without generating suspense, romantic without earning intimacy and serious without having anything particularly profound to say.
The performances are similarly stranded. The lead actors, Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner, appear to be working considerably harder than the material deserves, but no performer can manufacture chemistry, complexity or momentum when the script is substandard. Emotional revelations arrive without sufficient buildup, making them feel less like discoveries than items being checked off a screenplay’s to-do list.
Another annoyance, for the majority of the film, Barbaro is stuck wearing a halter dress that barely covers her butt cheeks and reveals endless side boob. You cannot unsee it. And there are too many jokes abut Turner’s ears sticking out.
And then there is the ending, which presumably is intended to provide some kind of payoff. Instead, it inspires the strongest reaction the movie has managed to provoke: relief that it is finally over.
The irony is unavoidable: for a movie called One Night Only, it feels like it lasts forever.
