Worth: $8.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Jennifer Lawrence, Andrew Barth Feldman, Matthew Broderick, Laura Benanti, Natalie Morales, Ebon Moss-Bachrach
Intro:
… so bland and forgettable it likely won’t have you feeling much of anything at all.
When the trailer for No Hard Feelings dropped earlier in the year, it was met with a mixture of reactions. First there was shock that a broad sex comedy, that appeared to be of the late ‘90s/early 2000s mode (think American Pie, Road Trip, The Girl Next Door), was being released in this often comedy-cautious year of 2023. Secondly, people expressed disbelief that Academy Award winning actress Jennifer Lawrence was appearing in a film that once upon a time would have been gathering dust in the straight-to-DVD section. Thirdly, folks were slightly baffled that a film about a 32-year-old trying to coerce a 19-year-old into sex was, you know, pitching itself as a rib-tickling laugh-a-minute flick. Basically, a collective “huh?” rose up from the sprawling mass of humanity. Well, now we’ve seen the bloody thing and the answer to that monosyllabic query is, unfortunately, far duller than you might expect.
No Hard Feelings is the story of Maddie Barker (Jennifer Lawrence), a down-on-her-luck barmaid/Uber driver who is about to lose her family home in Montauk, Long Island. Happily, an opportunity arises: helicopter parents Laird (Matthew Broderick) and Allison Becker (Laura Benanti) are looking for a young woman to broaden the horizons of their shy, awkward 19-year-old son, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). And by “broaden the horizons” we mean “root him stupid so he’s ready for college the following year”. Maddie, whose car has just been repossessed and is swamped with bills, agrees to the gig but soon discovers that Percy is a more difficult prospect than one might expect from an 19-year-old heterosexual young man. Hilarity ensues. Theoretically, at least.
So, look, here’s the thing. The premise for No Hard Feelings, while broad and a bit tone deaf in the current cultural climate, could have worked. With talent behind the camera like There’s Something About Mary-era Farrelly Brothers, this could have been a frequently very funny comedy about how people mature at different rates and the often toxic weight of parental and societal expectations. Alternatively, with someone a bit more introspective at the helm, this could have been a quirky but sensitive A24-adjacent dramedy with a sharp, incisive script. The problem with No Hard Feelings is that it never quite commits to being one thing and isn’t interesting or smart enough to straddle tones with any elegance.
The characters are all over the shop. Sometimes Maddie is a mercenary go-getter who does what she has to, other times she’s the helpless victim of a corrupt system, and every now and then, she experiences actual human emotion. Jennifer Lawrence is a fine actress and more than up to the task, but when a film wants you to howl with laughter at an awkward CGI-enhanced nude beach fight in one moment and get weepy for our plucky heroine the next, the end result is a feeling that maybe director/co-writer Gene Stupnitsky (Good Boys) didn’t quite know what film he was trying to make here. Poor bloody Percy suffers as well, portrayed as a pathetic loser for most of the film, he eventually showcases some intestinal fortitude, but it never really feels earned. It also doesn’t help that actor Andrew Barth Feldman isn’t exactly a dynamic screen presence, although with a script this choppy and inconsistent, that’s hardly completely his fault.
In the end, No Hard Feelings isn’t like those late ‘90s/early 2000s comedies that the trailer nods to. Hell, it wishes. It is, instead, a fitfully amusing (although never very funny) comedy with far too few jokes, a dramedy with precious little drama and a film featuring a star who tries gamely with the weak material but can’t fight the tide of mediocrity. Honestly, JLaw, was this for a bet? Do you have some Nic Cage-esque gambling debts? Because No Hard Feelings is so bland and forgettable it likely won’t have you feeling much of anything at all.
