Delayed Reaction: Hooking Up

Premise: Two relative strangers go on a cross-country sex trip in order to ignore other problems in their lives.

 

Can someone please sit down any filmmakers who want to make a RomCom and remind them that it's OK to just be light and fun? I've broken down the fractioning of the RomCom over the last 15 years many times already, so I'll spare you that full diatribe again. I just want to focus on the fact that basically all the movies that look like RomComs these days are RomDramComs, and that's bumming me out.

Take Hooking Up. This is a movie with two winsome leads in Brittany Snow and Sam Richardson. Both are best known for comedies. Richardson has some of the best comic timing of anyone I've seen. In Pitch Perfect, Snow makes up for her lack of pure comic chops with boundless energy. The idea of this movie is that Snow is a sex advice columnist looking to save her job. Richardson's wife divorced him, because they'd been together since high school and she wondered what other experiences they deprived themselves of. So, Richardson and Snow go on a cross country sex trip reliving all her past dalliances. There's a charming, lightly dramatic version of this premise which would be a very nice movie. In Netflix's hands, we probably would've gotten that movie.

 

Instead, Snow is a recovering sex-addict who has never been in a relationship because her mother did a number on her. Richardson is a testicular cancer survivor who found out he's gotten it again. At one of the locations during their road trip, Snow tells a story about a distraught wife who was paralyzed in a car accident after discovering her husband cheating on her with Snow. This movie is a bummer. This might not be a problem if it was something like The Big Sick where the moments of hilarity balance out the darker moments. Hooking Up isn't that funny though. That's the part of the 90s RomCom formula that people forget. Most of those aren't very funny either. But, since the drama never gets too intense, they don't have to be. If the drama is at a 1, the comedy only needs to be a 2 for it to remain a pleasant experience. In Hooking Up though, the comedy is still only at a 2 while the drama is at a 4 or 5. That's a balance that wastes the cast assembled.

 

That's the other thing about this movie. The cast is wasted. The fact that there weren't any Sam Richardson line readings that made me laugh in this is almost inconceivable. And, I love Brittany Snow, but I don't buy her in a rude, crude, and socially unacceptable role. Not everyone is Cameron Diaz. Lucky for this movie though, even when they are badly misused, Snow and Richardson are still appealing enough to make this movie decently watchable.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend