No Hard Feelings Review: Raunchy Business

Gene Stupnitsky’s 2019 feature-length debut, Good Boys, set out to reinvent the coming-of-age comedy, and it figured that the best way to do so was to have the filthiest words imaginable fall from the mouths of its pre-teen characters. His follow-up, No Hard Feelings, takes a similarly unimaginative approach to the romantic comedy, which in this case translates to juicing up bog-standard material with raunch, profanity, and violence.

Most of the film’s shocks involve Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence) in one way or another, and they include watching the Montauk native catch fire, get maced and punched in the throat, and beat up a trio of troublesome teens while buck naked. Through it all, you never doubt that Lawrence is game for anything, but this willingness to go all-in has been wasted on gross-out gags that are more often than not cringey and desperate in their calculation than funny or transgressive.

Early in No Hard Feelings, the single 32-year-old Maddie comes into the orbit of the neurotic and perpetually fearful Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) after his wealthy helicopter parents (Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti) post an ad on Craigslist for a young woman to “date” their 19-year-old son before he starts Princeton in the fall. The reward? An old Buick.

Despite being a little older than the woman Percy’s parents are looking for, Maddie, whose attempts to pay off the taxes on her deceased mother’s house are foiled by her car getting repossessed, convinces the despondent couple that her life experience makes her the perfect suitor to date their son’s “brains out.” It’s a contrived setup that prompts many questions, not the least of which is why an obscenely wealthy couple would even have a beaten-down Buick in their possession, let alone offer a more enticing reward like, say, cold hard cash.

Initially, there’s humor to be had in the sight of Lawrence’s ever-horny sexpot trying to seduce Percy, who’s such a prisoner to his anxieties that he can’t even make sense of Maddie’s heavy-handed double-entendres, much less make a move. It helps, at least, that Lawrence and Feldman bring a compelling chemistry to the screen, so that when Maddie moves from feeling sorry for Percy to realizing that he’s a pretty good guy, this evolution feels convincing.

But as Maddie’s courting of Percy goes into overdrive, the traditional, borderline misogynistic rom-com that No Hard Feelings is at heart begins to reveal itself. In a particularly icky turn of events, Maddie’s callous behavior toward men in her past—hinted at in brief appearances by two different exes (Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Quincy Dunn-Baker) whom she ghosted—is tied to her unwillingness to settle down. The way that Stupnitsky and co-writer John Phillips see it, she’d be fine if she’d stop fooling around and just find a man to put a ring on it.

Indeed, No Hard Feelings unambiguously demonizes Maddie’s singleness throughout its runtime. At one point, even her pregnant, married best friend, Sara (Natalie Morales), asks her how long she’s going to keep dating around before getting married and starting a family. And yet, the filmmakers see the character’s singleness and sexual experience as the only means of drawing Percy out of his shell. For a film so hellbent on proving how gross and extreme its comedy can get, its weirdly conservative view of women is actually its grossest element.

What ultimately sinks No Hard Feelings, though, is its inability to convincingly meld its excessively bawdy humor and its Hallmark Channel-level drama of two opposites who help one another to embrace life. (That the script also touches on but barely explores a number of topical issues, such as Gen Z’s addiction to phones and income inequality, further points to the filmmakers’ lack of commitment.) Stupnitsky and Phillips want to have their cake and eat it too, first presenting the film as a deliberate upending of rom-com tropes, only to increasingly give into the corny, overtly sentimental clichés of the genre that it gleefully mocks.