
Two love-starved strangers crash into each other on the one night of the year when single people are allowed to have sex.
Universal Pictures, Olive Bridge Entertainment
$25,000,000
The movie follows the premise that a regulation prevents sex for unmarried folks during the whole year except a 12h period that became a big night where people go out to accomplish all their fantasies.
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After decades of free love, the US government has decided that unless you are actually married then you have to keep it in your pants. They've even designed a special chip that will detect whether or not you get up to any horizontal jogging, so there's no cheating the system - except for one twelve hour period each year when condoms are like gold dust. "Owen" (Callum Turner) runs his own pizza place and has his own girlfriend, so cruising the streets isn't on his to-do-list tonight. "Allie" (Monica Barbaro), on the other hand, has got herself all dolled-up and is planning on hitting the town with her friend and not copping-off with the first bloke with a pulse she meets in the toilet queue. Unfortunately, neither of their evenings go exactly to plan and as it unfolds they repeatedly encounter each other after a series of bizarre shenanigans that involve grand theft, burglary - and who knew bubble wrap could be a sex toy? Now there so many holes in this plot that it's almost not worth bothering about at all - instead, perhaps, it's just an opportunity to watch eye-candy Turner (most of him) and Barbaro dance around each other before a denouement that you could see from space with your eyes welded shut. The scenarios are borderline slapstick and for the most part don't really impress - although they do at times remind us that when our hormones are a-raging, we don't always use our brains before embarking into the bushes or onto a motor bike or on a drinking binge. I still struggle to understand why British actors are cast and then forced to adopt Yankee accents - but Turner does as well enough with that as he does spinning pizza dough over his head and together the pair provide us with something cheesy and forgettable, but watchable on the telly at Christmas.