No Hard Feelings is a comedy that has two things going for it—a premise with a lot of genuine comedic potential and, in Jennifer Lawrence, an actress would seem to be the ideal fit for said premise. And yet, the film wastes no time in squandering both the premise and Lawrence via an execution that is neither as outrageous nor as adorable as it clearly believes itself to be. The result is an exercise in frustration—both for the characters on the screen and the people sitting in the audience—that always seems as if it is on the cusp of actually becoming something but never quite accomplishes that or any other goal.
Lawrence plays Maddie, a woman who has lived in the seaside town of Montauk all her life and is determined to stick it out despite the steadily rising property taxes brought on by the influx of summer tourists that are threatening to price her and her neighbors out of their homes. She is also a bit of a mess on many levels who ekes out a living as an Uber driver but when her car is repossessed for failure to keep up with the property taxes, she runs the risk of losing her late mother’s home to foreclosure. Potential salvation arrives in the form of a strange Craigslist ad from a wealthy married couple, Laird (Matthew Broderick) and Allison (Laura Benanti) requesting the services of a woman to “date” their painfully shy and withdrawn son, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), before he goes off to Princeton in the fall in the hopes of bringing him out of his shell. If she can accomplish this mission, there is a brand-new car in it for her.
Make no mistake, Maddie is essentially being asked to become a sex worker—not that there is anything wrong with that—but considering all the dumb things she has done involving sex in the past, secretly seducing someone and getting a car out of it doesn’t seem like such a bad or difficult deal by comparison. Alas, her plan to sweep him into bed (or the nearest alternative) immediately falls apart almost as soon as she meets him at the animal shelter where he volunteers. Her innuendo-filled flirtation doesn’t connect with him at all and when she employs the more direct tactic of getting him into her borrowed van and taking him back to her home for a presumably quick bit of fun, the Penthouse Forum-style setup results in him assuming he is being kidnapped and her getting several blasts of mace to the face. Nevertheless, she persists and while the attempted seductions fall through for one reason or another—including an interrupted bit of skinny dipping that turns into the oddest homage to Eastern Promises imaginable—she finds herself growing to genuinely like this odd kid after all while beginning to have second thoughts about going through with the plan after all.
On the surface, the basic premise of No Hard Feelings makes it sound like a throwback to the teen sex comedies of the early 80s in which young men found themselves attempting to lose their virginity to more experienced women with hijinks aplenty ensuing—a subgenre that yielded a few genuinely good films (including the classic Risky Business and the charming My Tutor), a lot of terrible ones (so many, in fact, that even the sequels to Porky’s did not constitute the true low-water mark) and kept Sylvia Kristel in cigarette money until it shifted gears in the middle of the decade with the sexless, feckless wares of John Hughes. I am not going to claim that I am yearning for a revival of this particular strain of filmmaking (though I would eagerly pick up a 4K of Class the moment such a thing hit the market) but considering how neutered and sex-free most films today have become, a throwback to the days of unapologetically raunchy summer sex comedies might not be the worst thing.
While No Hard Feelings may not be the worst thing, per se, it suffers throughout from a sense of terminal innocuousness. Although the screenplay by Gene Stupnitsky (who also directed) and John Phillips occasionally attempts to flirt with outrageousness, it ends up playing things way too safe for most of the running time. The comedic bits are, for the most part, never quite as hilarious as they think they are, the more character-driven moments try just a little too hard to take any potential edge off of the proceedings and the closest thing to actual narrative conflict—the inevitable moment when Maddie realizes she has actually feelings for Percy at the exact moment he learns of her deal with his parents—proves to be a bit of a dud in the way that the script goes out of its way to make sure that neither one ultimately suffers too badly in any way at the end or, for that matter, really learns much of anything.
The problem here is that once Stupnitsky and Phillips established their premise, it seems that they failed to do much of anything with it beyond that point. For a movie like this to work, once you establish that basic premise, you need to take it into new and intriguing directions in order to keep the laughs going. No Hard Feelings doesn’t do that and while that is bad enough, what is especially frustrating is the fact that there are so many potentially promising ways in which it could have gone but, much like Percy, is evidently too fearful to explore. For example, one of the few funny moments in the film comes when Maddie follows Percy into a teen house party, where she fears he may be hooking up with a classmate in what would be a potential deal-breaker—only to discover that, unlike the presumed bacchanals of her youth, these kids are more interested in performatively announcing their gender fluidity and enlightened views on sexuality online than in putting them into actual practice. (“Doesn’t anybody fuck anymore?,” asks Maddie at one point.) Why not figure out a way so that her attempts to seduce Percy end up firing a libidinous streak among the other coddled Montauk kids (while still negotiating the new rules and attitudes towards things like consent, female desires and the like), much to the consternation of their helicoptering parents? At least that might have led to the kind of mix of raunch and social satire that Risky Business mined so successfully 40 years ago this summer.
If nothing else, this approach might have given Jennifer Lawrence more to do here than come across as a good sport. This is pretty much her first real plunge into doing a big comedy (not counting Don’t Look Up and trust me, I don’t) and it seems to be a part tailor-made for the hot-funny-and-relatable persona that she has demonstrated throughout her career during press tours and award ceremonies. Whatever degree to which the film works is pretty much entirely due to her contributions—she fully commits to the wackier material and there are a few moments here and there where she and Feldman generate a reasonably convincing rapport amidst the silliness. Sadly, it doesn’t amount to much in the end because in spite of their efforts, they cannot break free of the shackles of a screenplay that too often comes across as little more than Licorice Pizza By and For Dummies and which really begins to drag and devolve into tonal incoherence during the last third.
I really wish that had liked No Hard Feelings because successful screen comedies—especially of the unapologetically R-rated variety—are so rare these days that I go into them hoping that this might be the one to turn things around and make them viable again. And yet, not even the combination of my desire for that and my affection for Jennifer Lawrence can make up for the fact that this is a sex comedy that isn’t particularly funny or sexy. Of course, humor is subjective, I suppose, and I guess that if you are in the mood for a sex comedy that plays like a lesser John Hughes film, sans the erotic heat, you might get a few laughs out of this. As for the rest of us, I guess we will just have to go back to the Bottoms trailer.