Why does this film, a broad, raunchy sex comedy with a big name and a big heart, feel so special and rare? From what I’m told, we used to get a film like this every week. No Hard Feelings shouldn’t have to be such an oasis in a desert, especially because it’s just nice! It’s a normal movie! It’s got jokes, it’s filmed in a real location (Montauk baby!), and there are silly comic setpieces without action violence! It’s a movie! Is the marketplace so sick that if this fails, we might not get another summer R-rated studio comedy for years? Yes. But I have faith.
Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence), a Montauk native, is dangerously close to losing everything. Her bills are piling up and if she wants to keep her mother’s house, she has to work multiple jobs. That’s tough when her car is repossessed, making it impossible for her to keep driving for Uber. With few options left, Maddie answers a weird Craigslist ad: wealthy parents Laird and Allison (Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti) are looking for a girl to “date” their teenage son Percy (Jimmy Award winner Andrew Barth Feldman) in exchange for a car. They want him to come out of his shell a bit before college, and a girl… “dating” him… could be the key. Maddie embarks on her secret mission with aplomb, but Percy proves a tough egg to crack. Will Maddie find her way into Percy’s heart and pants?
The premise is stupid, but much like Stupnitsky’s previous effort Good Boys, it’s perfect for joke after joke after joke. JLaw remains a luminous screen presence, even when she’s screaming after being maced or wheezing from a throat punch. My favorite modern trend is actors that seem like they’re having fun at their jobs, not just stumbling around green screen parking lots or being held hostage by Jason Sudeikis. JLaw brings everything she has to this role, especially in a full-frontal fight sequence reminiscent of The Terminator. She’s having a blast, so the audience will too. She also handles the character’s backstory well, playing exposition drops with perfect pathos and little treacle. There’s a bit of treacle, of course, but the film is funny enough that the sweetness never feels like overkill.
No Hard Feelings tries to get to something real, and it mostly succeeds! The relationship between Maddie and Percy is actually nice and mostly chaste once they actually start talking. Feldman is more than able to match wits with Lawrence, an impressive feat for a young actor. They both have laugh out loud line deliveries, something that feels rarer by the day. For some reason, general audiences aren’t showing up for theatrical comedies anymore. I’m thankful the team behind No Hard Feelings is making this feel like a real movie while so many others slide into the streaming abyss. I am also thankful it is actually funny, another rarity in the “comedy” genre lately. The jump chord when Maddie first appears at Percy’s place of work is one of the funniest things to happen in a movie for a long time. It shouldn’t be this hard!
No Hard Feelings
2023
Dir. Gene Stupnitsky
103 min
Opens in theaters Friday 6/23
