No Hard Feelings

The mid-bud­get stu­dio com­e­dy fall from grace has been trag­ic, to say the least. A beloved genre that used to com­man­deer both box office and home enter­tain­ment for decades, its humour guar­an­teed to pen­e­trate main­stream con­scious­ness, is now risky, most­ly unprof­itable busi­ness. Slap­stick come­dies, action come­dies, screw­ball come­dies, rom-coms – they’ve all been sub­ject to the ebbs and flows of pub­lic taste, yet today’s most quotable and cul­tur­al­ly res­o­nant lan­guage finds itself less in Apa­tow-isms. When memes and Tik­Tok trends can be spread faster and wider than any non-fran­chise movie, the future of the stu­dio comedy’s appeal can only con­tin­ue to seem bleak.

Gene Stupinsky’s sec­ond direc­to­r­i­al fea­ture, No Hard Feel­ings, is a clear nos­tal­gic throw­back to the late ​’00s humour of Super­bad and The Hang­over, and it does man­age to hit a few of those notes, though it nev­er real­ly lives up to the promise of the raunchy R‑rated com­e­dy its trail­ers try to sell it as. Jen­nifer Lawrence, who is also an exec­u­tive pro­duc­er of the film, makes her first for­ay into com­e­dy and stars as Mad­die Bark­er, a role that seems to have been writ­ten only with her mind (see the ​“Where’s the piz­za” era of #ran­dom 2010s humour that at one point even became syn­ony­mous with the actor), and she seems to be hav­ing a lot of fun with it.

She leans into the groove of the char­ac­ter, a 32-year-old Uber dri­ver liv­ing in Long Island beach town Mon­tauk, who faces bank­rupt­cy after her only source of income – her car – is repos­sessed. With her home on the verge of fol­low­ing suit, she stum­bles upon a Craigslist ad post­ed by a cou­ple of heli­copter par­ents (Matthew Brod­er­ick and Lau­ra Benan­ti). They offer a 2004 Buick Regal to any woman will­ing to ​“date” their text­book awk­ward 19-year-old son Per­cy (Andrew Barth Feld­man) for the sum­mer before he goes to col­lege, as they fear that he’s not prop­er­ly adjust­ing to adult life.

Odd cou­ple flicks have to rely on the chem­istry between their two leads for the for­mu­la to work. Luck­i­ly, Feld­man and Lawrence bounce off each oth­er quite well and give strong, com­mit­ted per­for­mances, forg­ing a sol­id enough emo­tion­al core to the rela­tion­ship between Per­cy and Mad­die. The bad news is, they’re let down by a hope­less­ly insipid, charm­less script and pre­dictable dra­mat­ic beats that lead to a tonal­ly incon­sis­tent final prod­uct that, by the third act, awk­ward­ly shifts into a sen­ti­men­tal register.

Tedious jokes float aim­less­ly into space with­out ever land­ing any­where, and at best, elic­it a cou­ple of rote chuck­les in a sea of crick­ets. You’d think a premise this ridicu­lous would have the gall to lean hard into its utter absur­di­ty and go as weird as pos­si­ble. Instead, we get mis­guid­ed attempts at com­men­tary on Gen Z’s smart­phone addic­tion, and a strange brand of whole­some­ness forced down our throats.

Per­haps the demand for super low-stakes, ​“turn your brain off” stu­dio come­dies where the only point is cathar­tic laugh­ter will one day return. It brings this writer no joy to report that No Hard Feel­ings isn’t the film to ush­er in that era.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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