Jennifer Lawrence has returned in No Hard Feelings to remind us that she’s really damn funny
Like most funny stories, No Hard Feelings seems like a bad idea at first. It’s a movie in which Jennifer Lawrence, in her first lead role in a full-on comedy, spends approximately 103 minutes trying to seduce a socially awkward 19-year-old for financial gain. It’s also wildly funny, and a great reminder of how good J-Law is at lighting up a screen.
Lawrence plays Maddie Barker, a woman who has grown up in Montauk her whole life and is trying to stay there. Struggling to pay property taxes on the home she inherited from her late mother, Maddie gets by on odd jobs — and then loses her car for not making payments on it, too. No car means no Uber driving and no tourist money for bills. But Maddie has found an incredibly unconventional way of scoring new wheels: a pair of wealthy parents willing to give a car to a nice girl who will sleep with their shut-in son before he goes to college.
No Hard Feelings has a premise that, on paper, skirts the line of good taste, but in practice is too sweet to ever really be transgressive or overly raunchy. Maddie is a hot mess who happily burns bridges and doesn’t care much for social niceties; hooking up with a 19-year-old is no big deal to her. Unfortunately, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), said teenager, is too nervous and sweet to accept any of Maddie’s advances, and she has to win him over — because Percy cannot know that his parents arranged the whole thing.
Sex farce gives way to a story of unlikely friendship as Maddie tries to seduce a boy too scared of everything to even register he’s being hit on. She has to compete in a decathlon of humiliation — getting maced, beating the crap out of some thieves while nude, and getting her ass lit on fire while she clings to the hood of a
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