If anyone could have saved the studio comedy, it might have been Jennifer Lawrence. But if the uneven sex comedy “No Hard Feelings” is Hollywood’s best effort, it’s not looking good for either one. Starring Lawrence as a broadly sketched caricature of an emotionally stunted, sexually liberated thirtysomething struggling to stay afloat, “No Hard Feelings” tries to resurrect the messy white woman trope that worked so well in films like “Young Adult” and “Trainwreck.” Though by no means a guarantee, there’s a crucial difference between those movies and “No Hard Feelings” — actual women wrote them.
Though Lawrence, who is also an executive producer of the movie, is working overtime to make the stilted and over-the-top humor work, director Gene Stupnitsky (co-writing with John Phillips) seems far more interested in trying to invert conventional gendered comedy tropes. Lawrence dons skin-tight dresses soaked in water, takes a punch to the groin in a fully nude fight scene, and practically trips over herself to seduce a young nerd.
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It’s like “Never Been Kissed” crossed with “Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo.” While there are moments of committed physical comedy and a few good line deliveries, the circumstances are neither believable nor outrageous enough to add up.
“No Hard Feelings” takes place in Montauk, a formerly middle-class Long Island beach town that has slowly been taken over by the moneyed elite. These shifting demographics are a source of constant stress and frustration for the diehard locals, like Maddie Barker (Lawrence), a bartender and Uber driver who is barely scraping by after the death of her mother. Though Maddie inherited her quaint childhood home on a desirable piece of property, she’s behind on property tax payments, which have tripled along with the town’s median income.
The movie opens as local tow operator Gary (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), still hurt since Maddie ghosted him after three months of dating, comes to repossess her car. Prancing out of the house in a classic bathrobe and lingerie, her attempts to charm him are interrupted by a shirtless Italian man stretching on her lawn. As he feels her up from behind, she insists they’re just cousins. “You know how Italians are,” she pleads. The message is clear: Maddie is a player with no time for emotions.
When she comes across an ad for a unusual gig to “date” a sheltered high schooler in exchange for a Buick, it seems the fastest way to get a car. “You know how these helicopter parents are,” says her schlubby surfer friend (Scott MacArthur). “They’ll do anything for their kids. I’m surprised they’re not gonna fuck him themselves.” (That the secondary male character gets some of the movie’s best lines reveals the writers’ allegiances.)
Commuting by rollerblade since losing her car, Maddie arrives at the sloped driveway of the family’s sleek modern mansion huffing and puffing. As she ascends the stairs with an eager determination, the aforementioned helicopter parents (the underused Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti) look on serenely. Mom and Dad don’t have distinct traits other than being rich and out of touch, which might have been avoided if they had more than two scenes — one in the beginning and one at the end.
Once Maddie meets Percy (newcomer Andrew Barth Feldman), his meddling parents recede into the background, their presence only a faint reflection in the nervous son they’ve sheltered into helplessness. Attacking the kid with a feral intensity, Maddie takes a sexual approach to the assignment, misreading the tender virgin at every turn. After Maddie forces a ride home on the kid and snatches his phone away, he maces her in an attempt to avert his obvious kidnapping. But the shock of Percy hosing her down with her eyes glued shut doesn’t quite land, and neither does her naked beatdown of a group of clothing thieves on the beach.
The ridiculous scenarios are obviously meant to be funny, but they mostly feel contrived and arrive out of the blue, with little build-up to sudden forced outrageous. Much like Maddie’s aggressive seduction of Percy, the movie bludgeons the viewer with its outlandish scenarios and awkwardly juvenile sex talk. Without being let in on her logic, Maddie decides that she must sleep with Percy in order to get the Buick, even though the initial pitch was just to get him out of his shell. “I promise I’ll put out,” Percy says, after he gets to know her better.
As the lead of the movie, Lawrence is expected to do most of the heavy lifting, but she gets very little help from Barthe Feldman, who has interpreted Percy’s shyness and anxiety as being boring and lifeless. The script does him no favors with the thinly sketched character, but he makes no interesting physical choices to signal any sort of personality hiding behind the cautious teenager facade. But most galling is how utterly unmoved he seems by Maddie’s obvious charisma, hiding any glimpse of pent up desire he might be harboring, even if it is just for conversation.
The most incisive humor is directed towards kids Percy’s age, who are all on their phones at a party Maddie crashes, where she gets called ma’am and is kicked out after making what is basically a no homo joke. While it’s funny to watch even the youthful Lawrence deal with ageism, the focus on her age begs the question of who the movie is for.
Percy isn’t a full enough character to draw in younger crowds, which means it’s for people Lawrence’s age who…want to hang out with teenagers? As with most inverted Hollywood tropes, merely switching the genders to put dude humor into a woman character will always ring false. Much like Percy’s performance anxiety, it just falls flat.
Grade: C-
Sony Pictures will release “No Hard Feelings” in theaters on Friday, June 23.
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