In the comedy No Hard Feelings, the summer season is beginning in Montauk, and the introverted rich kid Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) is slated to enter Princeton in the fall. His over-protective and intrusive parents worry that his social immaturity will stunt his future, so they hire a financially strapped Uber driver/bartender (Jennifer Lawrence) to date him and get him out of his shell – essentially to take his virginity for a used Buick Regal.
Of course, it’s absurd that Jennifer Lawrence would have 103 minutes of difficulty in seducing a high school senior, and part of the fun is in suspending disbelief. It all makes for good, dirty fun, and No Hard Feelings is an amusing diversion because of Jennifer Lawrence.
After her stunning dramatic debut in Winter’s Bone, Lawrence has shown a gift for comedy in Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle and Don’t Look Up, establishing that she can soar in wise-cracky role. She cracks wise here, too, and also shows off a gift for broad physical comedy in bits like climbing concrete stairs on roller skates.
Lawrence has achieved fame and fortune from eight fantasy movies as Katniss and Raven, respectively, in the Hunger Games and X-Men franchises. She has recently voiced her desire to return to human-scale stories, and No Hard Feelings is one of these, along with the much better Don’t Look Up and Causeway. Good for her.
No Hard Feelings skewers helicopter parents and the invasion of rich outsiders pricing the locals out of their hometowns. Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti are excellent as the parents, and Broderick’s rich guy haircut is priceless.
The Wife and I laughed together at some scenes; she laughed at some others and I laughed at some more. I liked the movie more than she did, but neither of us complained about wasting an hour-and-a-half of our lives. We talked about it on the way to dinner, and I haven’t thought about it since.
Co-writer and director Gene Stupitsky wrote for the American version of The Office, earning some Emmy nominations, so he is capable of better comedy than this, I’m not embedding the trailers because both the Sony red band trailers make No Hard Feelings look like a very stupid teen comedy and, although it has elements of that type, it’s much better that that overall.
