No Hard Feelings

On the brink of losing her home, 32 year old surfer, part-time bartender, part-time Uber driver (who also recently lost her car), and full-time surly motherfucker, Maddie Barker agrees to “date” a wealthy couple's introverted, awkward, and virginal 19-year-old son, in exchange for a Buick Regal, in order to bring him out of his shell before he goes to college. Comedy ensues and unexpected connections are made as two lonely people discover a little bit about each other… and themselves.

Like all big studio comedies, No Hard Feelings was sold on its premise: “Helicopter parents secretly hire a woman to pretend to be their son’s girlfriend, so that he can get laid for the first time, and go off to college with confidence, and not as an awkward loser virgin.”

Like all big studio comedies, in an obvious effort to keep the film’s run-time down to just 90-ish minutes, No Hard Feelings cuts out a ton of its set-up, its plot connectivity, and its side-character moments, which means, with only 20 minutes or so left, the film suddenly remembers that it needs a denouement, so it starts flailing about wildly as it desperately tries to gather up its loose strings into some vague semblance of a last act.

And like all big studio comedies… it doesn’t pull it off.

Jennifer Lawrence is an incredible talent. She is a fearless performer with a killer comedic timing, just abslutely brimming with charisma, and able to show so much with only a simple facial expression. She does some full frontal nudity here, during a wild beach fight, after an attempted skinny-dipping seduction is interrupted by some passing hooligans, so while she is, of course, obviously beautiful, it’s a scene with a lot of unflattering angles and jiggles, and Lawrence absolutely throws herself into it, both figuratively and literally. It’s ridiculous. It’s hilarious. It’s super brave. And it’s also a shame that, for the most part, the rest of the film doesn’t come anywhere close to this level of audacity and comedic abandon, because with a better, more complete script that did, Jennifer Lawrence could maybe single-handedly bring back the raunchy R-rated comedy.

But…

Saddled with a half-ass, patchwork, slapdashed-together in Post script instead, ultimately, the film is too timid to lean into its unavoidably terrible premise, to afraid to really embrace it and go wild, and too unfocused when it comes to what it wants to say. Once the script downshifts into treating both characters as a sympathetic person, instead of focusing on the outrageous comedy of the situation, once it becomes too concerned with redeeming characters who not only are not really supposed to be redeemed, but also don’t need to be, because that’s frankly antithetical to the whole idea of the story, the tonal imbalance absolutely ruins any chance at all of not just a satisfying resolution, but for an overall funny experience.

Like all big studio comedies, No Hard Feelings has some laughs, sure, but it mostly just falls apart, and then stumbles on to its ending.