No Hard Feelings

Grade: C+

This has been on my mind ever since I first saw the trailer. Let’s go ahead and acknowledge the big credibility problem. In No Hard Feelings, we’re expected to believe that a 19-year-old straight boy (a virgin) wouldn’t be interested in advances made on him by Jennifer Lawrence. While skinny-dipping in the ocean, no less.

But let me explain how they arrived there. Lawrence plays an Uber driver/bartender who has just lost her car, and is in danger of losing her house. In desperation, she answers a Craigslist ad for an attractive woman in her early 20s (she’s 32, but they decide to make it work) to “date” her 19-year-old son. Get him out of his shell, and into somebody’s pants, before he starts school at Princeton in the fall. The payment, upon, um…completion, is a car. Great. That’s all she needs.

Director Gene Stupnitsky is the man also responsible for Good Boys, which was probably what you’d get if you mixed American Pie and Stranger Things together in a blender – and I quite enjoyed it. Here, the best laughs are already in the trailer, and the pacing/editing is better. Watching the movie, there’s the bit, then after it’s been hung out to dry much longer than desired, we wait patiently for the next one that we know is coming.

Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti are amusing as 19-year-old Percy’s parents. Their extensive stage and Broadway experience is a perfect fit for the roles they have. Our lead characters, Maddie and Percy, are played by Jennifer Lawrence and 21-year-old Andrew Barth Feldman with more sincerity and believability than the screenplay gives them. You’d think there would be legal repercussions from driving your car at top speed on the crowded beach in broad daylight, but that’s one of many things that get glossed over and forgotten about. It’s on to the next bit. After seeing all of Scarlett Johansson in Asteroid City, it’s apparently full-frontal female nudity weekend at the movie theater. Lawrence bares everything here, in a courageous scene of effective comedy and shock value.

I try not to just complain, but offer solutions on how what I saw could have been better for me. Why didn’t I like No Hard Feelings much? It needed to either be funnier, or lean more into the nice friendship that was sparked between our two protagonists. By spreading itself thinly between the two, it doesn’t get to sufficiently explore either avenue.

Grade: C+