Attempting to deliver a successful raunch-com in the unclenching society we live in today is certainly no easy feat. Yet, with a capable premise, and a top-tier actor in Jennifer Lawrence, No Hard Feelings seemingly has the recipe to provide audiences with a true laugh-out-loud adult comedy that we really haven’t seen since the early 2000s. Here Lawrence plays Maddie, an Uber driver in her early thirties that doesn’t have her life together, and who has just gotten her car repossessed. All seems lost for Maddie’s career until she comes across a Craigslist ad from a pair of rich umbrella parents who are looking for a girl to break their teenage son out of his shell before he heads off to college.
So, there are endless routes this film could’ve taken to deliver plenty of delightfully crude hysterics, yet it rarely gets there, if at all. The glaring issue with No Hard Feelings is that it feels like it doesn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. And it only mildly leans into the humor outside of surface level sight-gags. Gags that are more intended to simply break the overbearing dramatic undercurrent of this story, rather than just being effortlessly funny. Because this movie never feels like the full-throttle comedy it sells itself as in the trailers.
Furthermore, one could say most of the comedic bits in this movie are simply extensions of sequences already shown in the trailers. The story is slow out of the gate, the jokes in the writing feel flat, and the bulk of the runtime is built around the generic coming-of-age story of young Percy played by Andrew Barth Feldman and Maddie’s inevitable redemption. It’s a plot progression we’ve seen countless times and I’ll admit the performance from Feldman is able to elevate the intrigue a skosh, but it’s far from enough to make the emotional tone of the film work on any level.
Because the tone of this movie is all over the place from serious to silly and it never really gels. The direction from Gene Stupnitsky doesn’t work for much for effective comedy either. He lets the scenes run long which kills what humor these scenes do deliver and overall, the movie has a very basic look and progression to it. You can predict where this story will go and where the characters will end up and it all feels uninspired.
Now, admittedly there are some soft laughs here and there. Lawrence to her credit goes all in on this performance to make the humor as effective as possible and overall, I would say I enjoyed her performance. But this story never thinks out of the box, it reaches for the quickest laugh all too often, and the writing lacks a clever sense of humor with too many forced moments that come off a tad cringey instead of pleasantly raunchy. Raunch-coms can get crude and lewd, and when there’s a wittiness to it all the result is something like We’re the Millers or Horrible Bosses. No Hard Feelings never veers from its extremely safe path and sadly feels more like a raunch-com on training wheels.
Grade: D+
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Andrew Barth Feldman, Laura Benanti, Matthew Broderick, Natalie Morales, Scott MacArthur, Ebon Moss-Backrach Director: Gene Stupnitsky Writers: Gene Stupnitsky, John Phillips Distributor: Columbia Pictures Running Time: 103 minutes Rating: R (Sexual content, language, some graphic nudity, brief drug use) Year: 2023 Language: English Genre: Comedy
Anthony J. Digioia II © 2023 SilverScreen Analysis. All Rights Reserved.
