No Hard Feelings

I am just one of the many who have lamented the lack of mainstream Hollywood comedies in the past decade or so. Judd Apatow and his crew of stars like Seth Rogen, Steve Carell, and Will Ferrell had a good run in the early 2000s cranking out multiple hits like "Anchorman" and "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," but it's been pretty slim comedic pickings since then. This isn't to say comedy movies aren't still being made; they just seem to be either going straight to streaming services or are targeted at more niche audiences. There are several possible reasons for this (the decline in bankable movie stars, less people going to theaters, studios afraid to offend and/or take risks), but it's impossible to deny that the age of comedy movies entering the mainstream consciousness has been gone for some time.

So "No Hard Feelings" is a throwback in a few different ways, as it takes a big, A-list Hollywood star (Jennifer Lawrence) and asks her to carry a raunchy, R-rated comedy. All criticism of the movie itself aside, it's just nice to see something like this in the theaters again. I've always liked Lawrence and have long thought that her charmingly goofy real-life persona lends itself better to comedy than a lot of the drama-heavy or IP-related projects she is better known for. Kudos to her for agreeing to do something like this, even going so far as to serve as one of the movie's producers.

The plot itself is even a throwback to the comedies of old, almost serving as a kind of modern retelling of "American Pie". 19-year-old Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) is a meek and nerdy kid about to graduate high school, and has no experiences with girls, drinking, parties or sex. His rich helicopter parents (Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti) put out a Craigslist posting to try and find a young woman to "date" Percy in exchange for a Buick Regal. Enter Maddie (Lawrence), a 32-year-old Uber driver and bartender who is desperate for cash after her car is repossessed trying to pay property taxes on a home she inherited from her mother.

After all of the set-up is out of the way, the second act has a lot of funny moments centered around Maddie throwing herself at the easily flustered Percy, who would rather get to know someone before even thinking about anything physical. Maddie treats the entire thing like a transaction, just wanting to get things over with so she can get a car and earn some money, and Percy has no idea how to handle an ultra-attractive woman who is very suddenly and very aggressively into having sex with him. Feldman initially plays Percy as a Michael Cera type, bumbling and awkward in every interaction, yet so earnest and sweet that it's easy to root for him (and almost cast Maddie as a villain for a while).

Most of the laughs come from physical humor (including a nude scene you may have heard about) and a lot of sex mishaps and crass jokes. Some of it works, but a lot of it seems pretty tired and almost directly lifted from those early 2000s comedies. I'm willing to acknowledge that I am no longer a young person like I was in the early 2000s, so maybe this kind of thing will work better with the young people of today, even if I wonder whether or not they would find a lot of this stuff funny these days. Comedy is notoriously subjective! Maybe I've come full circle here, as I always complained that the critics gave bad reviews to the comedies I loved so much as a teenager, and here I am doing the same now to this movie.

At any rate, starting with a bizarrely tender piano performance of Hall & Oates' "Maneater," the movie tones down the raunchy laughs and shifts into a kind of stereotypical rom-com mode, as each character learns valuable lessons and everything is wrapped up in a nice little bow. This kind of predictable sentimentality almost feels like a cop out; there isn't enough there to try and muster some kind of character drama out of these two people. It's a strange mix with the sex comedy of the first half, almost feeling like the script was a mash of two entirely different movies.

At the end of the day, the chemistry between Lawrence and Feldman is enough to keep you watching, but the end result is a fairly middle-of-the-road comedy that we've all seen before. It's not a bad thing to spend some time with these characters and get some laughs out of some stupid material. If that's what you're in the mood for, this will certainly deliver. Like all the best dumb comedies, maybe it's not worth analyzing beyond that point. It's just that the movie tries a little too hard to inject some dramatic moments where they don't belong, making it hard to recommend as the R-rated sex comedy it's being advertised as.