After her return to the world of character-driven indie cinema last year with the drama “Causeway,” which she also produced, it seemed Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence had found her way back to the kind of grounded cinema on which she cut her teeth. Yet her latest film as star-producer, “No Hard Feelings,” directed by Gene Stupnitsky (“Good Boys, “Bad Teacher”), is about as hard a pivot as is cinematically possible.
Imagine the kind of late-;90s, early-2000s raunch-fest hard-R comedies that made the members of the “Frat Pack” like Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughn stars, mixed with the hackneyed plot machinations of a Kate Hudson rom-com, and you get a pretty good feel for the tone of this aberration.
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Lawrence plays a 32-year-old Montauk native named Maddie, who makes all her money as a bartender and Uber driver during the summer months when rich families swarm the beach hamlet. After her car is towed by an ex named Gary (Ebon Moss-Bachrach, pretty much playing a riff on his character in “The Bear”) due to back property taxes, Maddie is desperate for a new car so she can continue to Uber during the peak season so she can pay off those very taxes.
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While scrolling through Craigslist with her co-worker and friend Sarah (Natalie Morales, “Plan B”), she comes across an ad from a couple of wealthy helicopter parents (Matthew Broderick, Laura Benanti) who offer to trade their old Buick in exchange for a young woman helping their 19-year-old son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman, Broadway’s “Dear Evan Hansen”) come out of his shell before he heads off to Princeton in the Fall.
Maddie asks them if they mean “date” as in date or “date” as in “I’ll date his brains out.” The parents affirm the latter, and the movie moves from a raunchy version of “Failure To Launch” into something far cringier without ever seeming to realize it.
Lawrence is clearly having fun with the broad comedy aspects of the film, but much of what Maddie is subjected to crosses the line from raunchy to straight degradation, pushing the limit of just how broad it is too broad. She’s maced in the face by Percy when he thinks she’s abducting him. During a moonlight swim, some punk kids steal their clothes, and Maddie fights them – fully in the nude – resulting in her being punched in the vagina. Percy accidentally punches her in the throat during a rowdy teen party. She gets set on fire while riding the hood of a car. All of this is played for laughs despite not really being funny at all.
Worse, the script is peppered with throwaway jokes about incest, pedophilia, and the disabled that are seemingly meant to provocate just in case the crude humor hasn’t already been offputting enough, but mostly it just comes off as try-hard and creaky.
The flaccid script, co-written by Stupnitsky and John Phillips (“Dirty Grandpa”), addresses timely subjects like income inequality, helicopter parents, Gen-Z’s addiction to screens, and the compulsion to record everything, but never actually seems to have a point of view on any of these subjects. Instead, this shallow film uses these topical issues to propel its characters from one preposterous comedy set piece to the next. To see an actress of Lawrence’s caliber utter a hollow line like “I was hurt, so I hurt people” is perhaps the cringiest aspect of the entire film.
However, amid all the hollowness and crass humor, there is one scene, stranded in the middle of the film, with some actual heart to it. After Maddie and Percy realize they both missed their high school proms for various traumatic reasons, they dress up and take a limo together for a fancy meal out. Maddie prods Percy to play her something on the piano, so Percy serenades her with an emotional rendition of “Maneater” by Hall and Oates. Suddenly the film lets go of its artifice, and these two characters share something real. The camera holds onto Lawrence’s face as she listens in awe to Percy’s tender vocals, and, for a moment, the film transcends above the muck towards the sublime.
It’s in this moment that we see the true failing of the film: that it could reach such dizzying heights yet chose to strand its two talented leads in an endless cycle of recycled gags and boorish mediocrity. [D]