Walking a tightrope between raunchy fun and hard-to-overlook ickiness, No Hard Feelings is a disappointingly tame sec comedy that has not enough of either the sex or the comedy. If you have been put off by the central premise (Jennifer Lawrence plays a woman so desperate for money that she answers an ad placed by two parents who want her to give their son a full girlfriend experience) then I would simply say that the script, co-written by John Phillips and Gene Stupnitsky, works hard to make everything much sweeter and more palatable, arguably to the detriment of the comedic potential of the whole thing.
Lawrence is Maddie Barker, someone we first see panicking as her car gets taken away. She needs the cat to earn money as an Uber driver, allowing her to pay off an overdue amount of tax on the house that was left to her by her mother. Maddie is a bit of a mess, for a number of reasons, but she tries to put on a different persona when answering the aforementioned advert, placed by two parents who don’t want their son to know anything about the scheme. It has to seem natural and real, and Maddie believes she will easily present herself as a fine catch. Unfortunately, the young man (Percy Becker, played by Andrew Barth Feldman) is so painfully shy and awkward, and so unable to pick up on social cues, that a successful outcome seems far from guaranteed. Maddie soon learns that he’s also very sweet, which is a development/complication that she didn’t even consider.
The main strength here is Lawrence, who leans fully into any ridiculous moment her character is thrown into. Whether she’s insulting people who are delivering unwanted judgements, sharing the class-based chip on her shoulder, or delivering so many double entendres that quickly devolve into sledgehammering single entendres, Lawrence is a lot of fun, and it’s clear that she should try her hand at it more often. Feldman is also very good, perfectly embodying the kind of nervy and good-hearted nerd that would have been placed as the super-horny lead if this film has been made in the 1980s. The concerned/slightly creepy parents are well-played by Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti, both seemingly oblivious to the oddness of their approach to dealing with, and trying to help, their son. Natalie Morales and Scott MacArthur are fairly enjoyable as friends of Maddie, sometimes offering advice and sometimes criticising her choices, and Ebon Moss-Bacharach has a very amusing turn as the man who tows away Maddie’s car while wondering aloud why she broke off their short relationship without giving him any explanation or second chance.
Stupnitsky directs the whole thing with a disappointing lack of energy, not helped by the script that he and Phillips should have taken apart and rebuilt once they realised it wasn’t really working. And they should have realised that it wasn’t really working when the entire third act became far too dull and depressing. There are positives, but they are too little too late when it comes to outweighing the negatives, almost as if the film-makers forgot what kind of film they started with. It isn’t as if this is uncommon, many films like this one decide to push the laughs aside as the scene is set for a grand finale of rehabilitation and renewed love (be it for a character or just for life itself), but they have usually taken viewers on a more enjoyable journey before getting to that point.
It’s not dire, and I smiled a number of times as predictable moments played out, but this is hugely disappointing, and it lacks even one memorable set-piece (aside from one scene notable for Lawrence playing it completely nude, which gets more sad the more I think about it . . . THAT is the best you could come up with for a set-piece idea?). Either make a sweet rom-com or make a ballsy sex comedy. This neutered end result will, I suspect, end up pleasing less people as it tries to please everyone.
4/10
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