No Hard Feelings is billed as a raunchy comedy, a description so inaccurate it evokes Nelson Muntz’s immortal take, in The Simpsons, on David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch: “I can think of at least two things wrong with that title.”
Gene Stupnitsky, the writer-director who presided over Good Boys, was, presumably, aiming for edgy spectacle with a scene in which a naked Jennifer Lawrence charges toward three boisterous teens for a groin-kicking stand-off. Instead it’s emblematic of the entire horrifically misjudged, criminally unfunny enterprise.
What exactly is this supposed to be? With all solidarity to the Hollywood writers on the picket line, the crummiest beta AI could produce a funnier movie than this one.
Lawrence gurns and minces her way through an unholy constellation of bad ideas. Gen Z use their phones a lot and think millennials are old! Helicopter parents are overprotective! Something, something gentrification!
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The Oscar winner plays Maddie, a cash-strapped chancer who answers a Craigslist ad from a couple looking for someone to date their painfully awkward 19-year-old son, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). When she goes full Mrs Robinson at the animal shelter where the lad volunteers, her painful attempts to seduce him end with him pepper-spraying her.
It’s the first of several cringe-comedy sequences so devoid of merriment that this viewer longed for a sudden mace attack to get out of watching the rest of the film, whose plot is a weird conflation of gig-economy hustles, Uber driving, bar work, prostitution and sugaring.
Every pratfall, including the naked ones, is joyless and witlessly timed. Potentially interesting supporting characters, including Zahn McClarnon’s surfing lawyer, are introduced only to never reappear. The flat, dull dialogue is punctuated with strange, airless spaces during which a film critic can ponder their life choices and yearn for the comparatively halcyon days of lesser American Pie spin-offs.
“I’m crazy and I’m stupid,” Maddie yells during one of the failed naked pratfalls. Not at all, Jen, but you might need a word with your agent.
