No Hard Feelings

The Plot: Thirtysomething Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence) is in arrested development. Problems just seem to circle around her like flies, the latest of which involves her car being towed and a large property tax bill threatening her family home. The car was her form of employment as a rideshare driver, so she needs money fast. She comes across an online ad which initially sounds like a joke: two parents need a woman to bring their reserved 19-year-old son out of his shell, show him a good time and prepare him for what’s to come in college. At least, that’s what father Laird (Matthew Broderick) thinks about his son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). It’s time to date this young man and date him hard…

The Verdict: Broad American comedies tend to be particularly popular among audiences in this part of the world – even the middling to bad ones. No Hard Feelings is the latest one to rock up on our shores, sounding like a breezy summer comedy fronted by an Oscar-winning A-lister kicking back from the serious roles she’s known for. If only the film was as enjoyable for the audience as Jennifer Lawrence said she had making it. Its one-joke concept is apparently based on an actual Craiglist ad involving an older woman fake-dating a shy younger man to make him more worldly and get a car in return. It might as well have been written by ChatGPT given how clunky, awkwardly structured and outdated the script is. It comes across as something more akin to a dusty, rejected script from the American Pie era – which is a long time ago now.

And yet that’s what director and co-writer Gene Stupnitsky and John Phillips have served up here. Maddie is not a particularly credible character to begin with, a sort-of male fantasy figure of a hot woman sorely lacking in emotional depth and personality. She’s the kind of barely-there character who needs someone talented like Diablo Cody or Greta Gerwig to come in and do a script polish to make her a more rounded and authentic female character. On the page, Percy is only marginally better. He’s more awkward than shy and isn’t as unworldly as his parents think. His slide from being uptight to just going with the flow and falling for Maddie happens a bit too quickly to be credible. Maybe his parents have had the wrong idea and just need to let him find his own way, rather than force him into the outer world.

Andrew Barth Feldman does at least bring Percy to life a bit more than on the page, injecting some humour and sparkiness to his performance which bridges the age gap between him and Jennifer Lawrence. It’s a wobbly bridge though, not helped by Lawrence’s floundering about like a beached whale for most of the film. Maddie is a frustrating character in that she doesn’t know what she wants but has a decent heart when she wants to reveal it. Lawrence has a knack for comedy allright, but she is under-served by a script that is below her talents. Given that she’s been making pretty much one film a year for the last few years, she’s getting a bit rusty when it comes to spotting a good script. Either that or she needs to have a word with her agent. There are some good chuckles in the film, but not enough to make it the ideal summer romcom hit that it so desperately wants to be. It tries too hard to please and also doesn’t try hard enough, making it an odd, unnecessarily crude and slightly queasy watch. Forgettable.

Rating: 2 / 5

Review by Gareth O’Connor