When writer/director Gene Stupnitsky found out Jennifer Lawrence was going to play the lead in his new movie, he must have been incredibly happy. After all, she’s an Oscar-winning actress, and even though she hasn’t had a hit in eight years (since the final “Hunger Games” sequel), she still exudes all the qualities of a movie star.
Too bad she’s in a mess of a movie.
In “No Hard Feelings,” Lawrence plays Maddie, a lifelong resident of Montauk, the town at the eastern tip of Long Island. She lives in the house her mother left her, but because she’s behind on property taxes, she’s at risk of losing it. That’s when a friend (Natalie Morales) shows her a Craiglist ad placed by wealthy helicopter parents (Laura Benanti and Matthew Broderick) looking to hire a young woman to date their son, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). He has just graduated high school but is so introverted they’re afraid he’s not ready for the experiences he’ll encounter in college (i.e. he’s a virgin). As a reward, they’ll give her a used Buick Regal, which Maddie needs because she’s an Uber driver and her car’s just been repossessed.
I’m not sure whether “No Hard Feelings” is supposed to be a callback to the wacky sex comedies of the 1980s or 1990s (e.g. “American Pie,” “Hardbodies,” “Spring Break”) or a warm coming-of-age story, but it doesn’t work on either level. It does have some amusing sequences, but most are cringeworthy, including a scene in which the completely nude Lawrence fights three people on a beach.
The screenplay drips with lame double entendres, starting with the title, “No Hard Feelings.” Hard, get it? When Maddie first meets his parents at their home, she asks, “Do you mean date him, or date him?” To which they reply, “Yes! Date him hard!”
The moronic dialogue doesn’t stop there. Percy works at an animal shelter, so Maddie goes under the pretense of adopting a dog. When she first sees him, he’s holding a dachshund, and she asks, “Can I touch your weiner?” Ha ha ha! Isn’t that hilarious?
No, it’s exactly the level of sophomoric humor I’d expect from Stupnitsky, who made “Good Boys” (I reviewed it here), a 2019 movie in which he had 12-year-old boys cursing and playing with sex toys. Oooh, how risqué!
Throughout the movie, I kept thinking about how differently the whole project would have been if the genders in the story were reversed. Would anyone think it okay to make a movie where parents hire a 32-year-old man to deflower their 19-year-old daughter? Other than Woody Allen, I mean.
Another oddity is that the soundtrack is full of songs from the 1980s: “The Stroke” by Billy Squier, “Maneater” by Hall and Oates, “You’ll Accompany Me” by Bob Seger. Considering the ages of Maddie and Percy, neither of them was alive when those songs were first airing on the radio. I should know, since I was the one playing them in that era! The first three years of my commercial radio career were as a DJ at WRCN, a rock station in Riverhead that had a massive audience all over the east end of Long Island.
Because of that experience, I can report that Stupnisky gets one thing right in “No Hard Feelings” — the way the locals view the hundreds of thousands of rich people who show up from Memorial Day to Labor Day. It’s kind of a reverse snobbery, as they look down their noses at the invading horde of tourists causing traffic jams on the narrow roads, throwing money around, and paying exorbitant prices to rent houses.
Lawrence took a break from movies for a couple of years, and this is how she opts to re-start her career? I thought she did great work in the Amazon movie, “Causeway” (my review is here), but prior to that she bombed with “mother!” and “Red Sparrow” and “Passengers.”
Lawrence still has the ability to light up the screen, but at times in “No Hard Feelings” you can actually see her trying too hard, as if she knows the movie’s success relies on her completely (which may be why she agreed to the nude scene). If the marketing continues to focus on the sex farce and her skin-tight dresses, it may bring in a few dollars out of curiosity, but I have a feeling word of mouth won’t help it going forward.
I’m certainly not going to get that ball rolling, as I give “No Hard Feelings” a 3 out of 10.