What more predictable way of introducing a sex addict than, well, with a sex scene?
In the first few minutes of “Hooking Up,” which is available on demand, Darla (Brittany Snow) has an intimate encounter with the leader of her sex-addiction support group right before a meeting, smokes indoors and offends a cancer patient. She’s a crass, messy, rule-breaking antiheroine, and her work as a sex columnist only enables her promiscuity, until it becomes so excessive (in-office intercourse with an intern), that she is fired. Darla’s meet-not-so-cute with the aforementioned patient, Bailey (Sam Richardson), who has just learned his testicular cancer has returned, sets off a raunchy rom-com plot.
When Darla’s group suggests that as a therapeutic exercise she map the scenes of her past sexcapades, she proposes re-enacting those memories with Bailey on a cross-country trip. The experiment presents Darla with an opportunity to get back in her editor’s good graces with an irresistible pitch for a juicy sexual travel diary. Meanwhile, Bailey, whose scorecard includes only his recent ex, will get to flaunt his new “girlfriend” on a last hurrah before he faces surgery.
With his first feature, the director and co-writer Nico Raineau flips gender stereotypes, giving Darla more sexually aggressive traits and Bailey more timid ones But even that feels trite, especially when the itinerary, including the bumps along the way, is consistently foreseeable: opposites bonding, manipulation, self-discovery, then finding their way back to each other — through a cringey epiphany, no less.
Hooking Up
Rated R. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
