Written by: Gene Stupnitsky & John Phillips
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Andrew Barth Feldman, Laura Benanti, Natalie Morales, Matthew Broderick
Rating: [2.5/5]
Parents generally want what’s best for their kids as they try to be the best guardians in helping their young ones grow up. However, they can only do so much in their journey and have to at times hire a professional such as a tutor in the academics or in the case of No Hard Feelings someone willing to teach something more intimate. Rolling in with a questionable plot, this film has some fun moments mostly led by the lead actor but ultimately does not cut the mustard as anything worth remembering.
Struggling financially to the point where her car gets repossessed and must roller-skate everywhere, Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence) answers a Craigslist posting where concerned parents want her to date and have sex with their 19-year-old son, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). Amidst her attempts to make the interaction natural, Maddie learns and appreciates more about this young man.
The plot of No Hard Feelings carries the comedic throughline where it serves as a criticism of this style of parenting on top of the expectations of what it means to engage in what ultimately operates as sex work. Parents have evolved from helicopter parents where they maintain hypervigilance and now practically operate as snowplow parents where they try to remove all obstacles in front of their children. Something that appears helpful initially but takes away from the natural adversity everyone must face and overcome. The parents in this film want to push along their meek son to have a sexual relationship with a woman. To their knowledge he has not had any success nor has he really tried, so they essentially want to force this experience upon him even if it means paying someone to do it.
Therefore, we have the central fulcrum at the center of this story, where Maddie needs to engage a relationship with Percy but not make it seem obvious that she has a vested interest in them having sex. This task inherently carries comedy because not often would a woman like Jennifer Lawrence find herself going after a 19-year-old scrawny kid who if I were told was a 15-year-old, I would believe you. Her attempts to sexually seduce obviously run into some issues, but the attempts make for the best moments, where she essentially has to convince Percy to try to sleep with her. Certain scenes truly stand out in this feature, with the one most will remember transpiring on a beach late at night that went in directions I did not expect, but really has this film shine at its brightest.
However, once we get towards the second and third act this film becomes quite conventional in a manner that makes it fairly uninteresting. It demonstrates a script lacking in anything truly innovative in how it wants to tell its story, and falls back on some tired tropes that never quite amounted to anything remotely interesting with these characters. The film therefore loses all of its momentum after the more outrageous moments happen, as it tries to wrap up this story with a more emotional appeal to the characters that never felt fully realized.
That does not detract from the fun work of Jennifer Lawrence in this feature. After taking a well-deserved break, she has returned with a vengeance to display she knows how to do great comedy. She bears the full weight of any semblance of success this feature has squarely on her shoulders, and does her best to make it all work. She unfortunately gets saddled with a fairly lackluster script that does not offer her much support in trying to eschew the success of what No Hard Feelings sought to accomplish.
As down the middle as it gets from me, No Hard Feelings does plenty well mostly through the performance of Jennifer Lawrence and some of the shock value moments, but it mostly falters when it tries to add emotional appeal and conclude its story. An actor can only do so much to elevate this material but some may find more appreciation for what this story has to offer other than the more raunchy elements that certainly exist within it. I found some of it lacking but by no means would I consider this to be a bad film, just not one that necessarily expands beyond its basic ideas.
Films with Josh 
