Hooking Up (2020)

Hooking Up is the kind of road-trip comedy that sneaks up on you: it’s raunchy and fearless on the surface, but it’s really about two bruised people using humor, bravado, and bad ideas to inch their way toward honesty. Brittany Snow and Sam Richardson have a disarmingly warm chemistry, finding real tenderness in the middle of wildly awkward detours, and the movie’s gender-role flips give familiar rom-com rhythms a friskier, more modern pulse. The vibe is spirited and a little messy—part confessional, part buddy movie, part romantic near-miss—always moving fast enough to keep the laughs coming while letting the emotional beats land. It’s not for the squeamish (the sexual talk is constant and explicit), but if you can roll with the crassness, you’ll find a surprisingly sweet, human story about learning there’s more to connection than performance.

Hooking Up is clearly aiming for a raunchy-but-heartfelt road-trip therapy story, using sex addiction and cancer recovery as messy catalysts for two lost people to grow up. The problem is it often plays like a safe, conventional rom-com wearing edgy clothes: lots of talk about sex, but the humor and “daring” moments don’t land as sharply as the premise promises, and the tone can lurch between sincere trauma and sitcom setup. Sam Richardson and Brittany Snow do what they can to sell the connection, and there are a few genuinely tender beats, but the script leans trite and occasionally oddly prudish for a movie this explicit. If you want bold comedy or a nuanced take on addiction, this may feel shallow; if you’re fine with crass sex chatter wrapped around a predictable redemption arc, it’s an easy, mildly sweet watch.