Ever since The Hunger Games series wrapped, Jennifer Lawrence has struggled to find her place within the industry.
Where once she was meeting Harvey Weinstein and being propelled into super stardom over a very short period of time, now Hollywood can’t decide if the former X-Men actress is a franchise star, an Oscar-winning artist, or just box office poison.
While she has been in some pretty awful films in recent years – so much so that she even took a two-year break from acting in 2019 – this uncertainty towards Lawrence isn’t helped by the fact that a lot of stupidity regularly comes out of her mouth.
Thanks to her ability to stick her foot in her mouth, Lawrence has begun to repel audiences away from any film she is involved in, to the point where she’s now taken to starring and producing in her own films – like No Hard Feelings.
An R-rated sex comedy reflecting the degeneracy of our society and whose premise has many questioning if it would have been allowed to be made had the gender been flipped, No Hard Feelings stars Lawrence as Maddie Barker, a 32-year old Uber driver living in upstate New York who one day finds that her car – and thus her only source of income – has been repossessed.
With her house on the verge of following suit, Maddie soon stumbles upon a to answer a Craigslist ad from an older couple offering up a car to any woman willing to sleep with their young son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), who they fear is not adapting properly to adult life.
Taking up their offer with the aim of dating Percy just long enough to get the car, Maddie soon finds that the more time she spends with him, the more she begins to actually like him.
Not romantically, of course, but Maddie does come to realize that she’s taking advantage of a teenager with a good heart for completely selfish reasons.
It’s comical how Hollywood always wants to have their cake and eat it too.
The age of the ‘1980s sex comedy’ has been dead for quite some time and it’s Hollywood that killed it, having pushed the narrative that these types of films were problematic because they appealed to ‘The Male Gaze’ and sometimes used women for laughs.
And now, Hollywood wants to revive that same genre by using Lawrence as the vehicle to make it ‘acceptable’ – but in the end, all they managed to do was make a film that has no idea who its target market is.
No Hard Feelings wants to appeal to the nostalgia of old school sex comedies but with a progressive slant, but that audience doesn’t exist.
Genre fans- a.k.a. men – don’t want to see Lawrence lead a gender-flipped subversion of the films that provided them with any number of laughs throughout their adolescence.
Meanwhile, women don’t want to see a film of this nature because they have been told to view these types of movies as inherently ‘bad’ or offensive.
Though the film fails as an entry into the ‘raunchy comedy’ genre, it isn’t outright awful.
In terms of acting, Lawrence does a pretty solid job of trying to shake-up her image, even going so far as to do a full-frontal nudity scene that’s played up as one of the biggest comedic moments of the entire movie.
Meanwhile, Feldman’s performance is a good microcosm of the film itself, standing as the physical embodiment of the film’s ‘awkward’ style of comedy.
Unfortunately, while the premise of No Hard Feelings is one that’s held together by spit and dreams, this ends up clashing with its desire to stay grounded in the realm of reality.
If this was an over-the-top comedy like Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, you could throw logic out of the window and accept No Hard Feelings‘ ridiculous premise.
But thanks to Hollywood’s continued infantilization of our society via modern entertainment, the film forces itself to ride the line of ‘being wholesome’, and so has to be called out for what it is.
Ultimately, No Hard Feelings is a mixed bag of a movie that, because of its ‘diverse’ dynamics, is not going to please everyone, if not anyone at all.