‘No Hard Feelings’ Review: Soft Launch
Jennifer Lawrence supplies megawatt star-power, but 'No Hard Feelings' isn’t funny or daring enough to truly break out.
The randy, rocky comedy No Hard Feelings (★★☆☆☆) hints at a few different meanings in its title, including the obvious sexual pun, which hardly warrants a giggle, and isn’t exactly accurate. The lead pair in this wannabe-bawdy, R-rated romp are plenty horny, actually, if not necessarily for each other.
Jennifer Lawrence plays Montauk bartender and Uber driver Maddie Barker, who’s sleeping off a hot night with a hunk listed in the credits as Gorgeous Italian Guy (Christian Galvis) when she wakes to find her car being seized by the county. Maddie owes thousands in taxes on the cute cottage her mother left her, her other bills are piling up, she needs a car to make that Uber dough from driving “summer people” around town all season, and she’s desperate to save her mom’s house.
Writer-director Gene Stupnitsky (co-creator of the buzzy new comedy series Jury Duty) stirs up a perfect storm of financial distress to send his working-class heroine down a road of last resort. She’s not down for sex work, per se, but she eagerly interviews for a sex work-adjacent job offered by the Beckers, one of those wealthy couples from the city whose multi-million dollar homes are the reason property taxes in Maddie’s beach village have shot through the roof.
Allison and Laird Becker (Laura Benanti and Matthew Broderick, who nail these neurotic “summer people”) are seeking a woman, preferably in her early to mid-20s, to seduce their severely introverted 19-year-old son Percy (talented newcomer Andrew Barth Feldman) out of his pre-Princeton isolation.
Though astutely drawn, styled, and acted as exactly the sort of touchy-feely kooks who would issue such a sticky proposal, the Beckers, and their hands-on interest in getting their boy laid, still come across as more funny-weird than funny-ha-ha. The film doesn’t settle on how to play that joke, ultimately mining their fraught family tension for a dramatic reveal about a malicious rumor that forced Percy to switch schools.
Still, Stupnitsky pushes hard to conjure outrageous comic setpieces, like a car careening out of control with Maddie clinging to the hood, or a nighttime beach brawl that Maddie fights totally in the nude. (It very much appears J-Law’s face was swapped onto a body double for the full frontal shots.) But the tone and pacing don’t gel.
Strains of the score, the shots, and the May-December romance harken to Mike Nichols’ The Graduate, though this isn’t as precisely crafted. And the movie never reaches or sustains the mile-a-minute, ever-escalating craziness of a Hangover or Bridesmaids, which seems to be the target.
Rather, it’s the dramatic moments between Maddie and Percy, tenderly rendered by Lawrence and Feldman, as their secretly contracted dalliance blossoms into true friendship, that are more surely handled.
Likewise, the film commits to its depiction of the struggles for working-class locals in a wealthy tourist town — as with Maddie’s bestie Sarah (Natalie Morales), who waits tables all summer because teaching the rest of the year doesn’t keep her bills paid. The realness is refreshing, but, unfortunately, the humor’s often stale.
Former SNL funnyman Kyle Mooney adds a sharply comic turn as Percy’s former nanny, Jody, still a vigilant protector of his charge after all these years. And, not for the first time in a big-screen comedy, the work of Hall & Oates is put to excellent use, both in service of laugh-out-loud comedy and heartfelt romance. There’s a sweet spot in between that the movie just misses, though that’s not for lack of trying.
No Hard Feelings is playing in theaters nationwide. Visit www.fandango.com.
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